


Where We'll Shine

by ForFighting



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M, New York Rangers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2014-06-05
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:17:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 61,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForFighting/pseuds/ForFighting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It all starts when Cam Talbot and Chris Kreider are called up from Hartford together. One minute, they're fighting to find a place in the NHL...and suddenly they're both fighting to figure out exactly what they've gotten themselves into.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Carry Me Home

**Author's Note:**

> DISCLAIMER: I do not own the New York Rangers or any of their players (but if you know where I can buy any of them, please let me know), this never happened, I do not claim that this is reality. I write fictionalized versions of characters who are loosely based on real people, that is all. Also, I don't play hockey, and some of my details will be off. For the sake of the narrative, any and all significant others belonging to the players portrayed here are considered nonexistent. 
> 
> This will be explicit eventually, but it does have a plot, so don't expect insta-dick everywhere. 
> 
> If you are reading this, I love you. This is my first ever hockey fanfic, I tried so hard to resist but these two just did me in. Blame the kisses. 
> 
> OH, and the title is taken from a line from "I Go To The Barn Because I Like The" by Band of Horses.

When Chris Kreider gets sent to Hartford, Cam knows he isn't going to be there for long. The kid is too good, has too much raw talent, even Tortorella has to see that eventually. And it isn't like Kreider gets discouraged; he just gets determined, he plays even better in Hartford than he was before. Cam is fully expecting him to get pulled right back up to the Rangers for good before long. He doesn't expect it to take until the next year, with a new coach, but it does - and he definitely isn't expecting that he'll get called up at the same time, but that happens, too. 

They joke a lot about how they're going to live it up in New York, how now that they've hit the big time, they're going to show everybody else how it's done, and yeah, have a lot of parties, too. But once the season starts, they don’t have much time to chat about their new circumstances, really. Not with how much focus it takes to keep up with a team that’s already been playing together for months. But when they’re on the ice, in the middle of the pressure of playing in the NHL, in the middle of getting to know a team that’s mostly unfamiliar to him, Cam finds that Kreider is one element he doesn’t have to worry about. He knows how Chris plays, even when he doesn’t play his best, the weaknesses are things he’s memorized by now. 

By November, Cam has started several games, and he’s starting to get the feel of his teammates, not just those who came up with him from Hartford. But the night they play Vancouver, it’s Kreider he makes a beeline for at practice, as he slides down into an almost-split, stretching down to rest his elbows on the ice next to Chris.

“You’re gonna show him,” he says, and Chris looks over at him quickly. There’s no doubt that he knows exactly what Cam is talking about, that he’s referring to Tortorella’s return to the Garden, but he frowns, like he doesn’t quite want to respond to it.

“It’s alright,” he says, shrugging as he bends into a stretch. “I’m not bent out of shape about it.”

“C’mon,” Cam prods, leaning to one side. “Guy gave you a hell of a time, you don’t feel like you gotta prove yourself even a little bit?”

Kreider lifts an eyebrow.

“You trying to help or trying to give me a complex?” he wonders aloud. Cam grins.

“Maybe both.” 

Kreider shakes his head then, and slides back up to his full six feet and some, and it’s the last they speak of it during practice. 

Later that night, though, despite all of Kreider’s insistence to Talbot and the media both that he has nothing to prove to John Tortorella, Cam finds himself on the other end of the ice gritting his teeth, eyes flickering across the bodies moving in front of the opposite goal, trying to lock onto the number twenty in the swarm.

“Come on, come on…” he murmurs, and then Kreider’s first goal goes in. And then it’s two, and suddenly, Chris Kreider scoring a hat trick on Tortorella’s new team is a very real possibility. It doesn’t happen until the third period, though, and by that point, Cam’s starting to think that he wants this more than Kreider does. When the hats fly down from the stands, he watches Kreider skate by the bench, and for a moment, he almost wishes he was there to congratulate him, instead of in the goal. 

Afterward, in the locker room, the mood is exactly what it ought to be. Everyone is celebrating, everyone is slapping Kreider on the back and making jokes about how many drinks they’re going to buy him. Cam shuffles by him, still laden down with gear, on the way to his things, and pulls Kreider into a rough half-hug on the way. 

“Told you,” he says quietly, then heads to a bench and begins taking off pads. A few of the guys meander by and offer him congratulations as well, but, as it should be, Cam thinks, this one is about Chris. He deserves this, he’s earned it. He hopes Tortorella noticed it and took it to heart, even if Chris insists that it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been sent to Hartford to get some experience. Even if tonight wasn’t about Chris, it wouldn’t be about Cam, after all, giving up two goals the way he did.

A few moments later, after everyone else has filed out of the room, Kreider comes back in, wearing that _hat,_ the Broadway Hat, and Cam opens his mouth to say something but before he can, Chris speaks up.

“Don’t sweat it,” he says, and Cam’s surprised because he didn’t think he was being that obvious about beating himself up. 

“I’ll work harder,” he shrugs, and Chris lifts a finger, poking at the brim of the hat, tilting it at a jaunty angle, looking down at him.

“Me too,” he says, “Have to. Always. Can’t ever settle.”

“Yeah,” Cam agrees, “But tonight, you earned it. Live it up, rookie.”

Chris kicks at Cam’s toe, still inside of his unlaced skate.

“Don’t you ‘rookie’ me, old man.”

“I’m twenty-six,” Cam protests.

“Yeah, and I’m not a rookie.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Whatever. Just, listen..don’t beat yourself up over a couple of goals. We got the points. That’s the important thing.” 

“ _You_ got the points.”

“We all did. C’mon, we’re going out. Get your shoes on and do something to your hair.”

“Sure, mom,” Cam huffs, sliding out of his skates. 

“You can kick yourself over goals later. This was a good one, let’s go celebrate.”

“‘Kay.” Cam agrees, rubbing at his nose with one hand impatiently as he heads towards the showers. “I’ll see you all in ten, alright?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Chris leaves, and Cam feels a funny tightness in his throat. He shrugs it off, because manly men don’t get all choked up over their teammates coming back from their own post game hat trick party to reassure them, they just don’t. 

Nope.

 

—-

 

“Shit, Kreids,” Cam grumbles, hauling his drunken teammate into an elevator and managing (barely) to mash the button for the appropriate floor. “Fucking first round draft pick and you can’t even use your own legs for walking.”

“Boots were made for walkin’” Kreider half-sings, half-laughs. Cam rolls his eyes, suppressing a smile at the thought of how mortified Chris is going to be the next morning.

“Yeah, so why aren’t you walking?”

“Because, Cameron,” Chris says, somehow putting emphasis on every single syllable of the name, “I’m not wearing boots.”

“Jeez,” is all Cam can really say to that, but it’s alright because they’ve reached the right floor and he manages to help Kreider to his condo down the hall. “Gimme your keys.” He’s about eighty percent sure Kreider is faking it anyway; there’s no way a guy this fresh out of college is this bad at holding his alcohol.

“They’re in my pocket.”

“No shit, I thought you had ‘em up your ass. Get them for me.”

Kreider’s response is to lean against the wall and nuzzle the paneling, and Cam, genuinely beginning to get a little irritated, sighs and reaches into Chris’s pocket.

“You know this is how gay porn starts, right?” he grunts, fishing the keys out and unlocking the door. He guides Chris through the opening and gives him a push. To his dismay, Kreider staggers into the room and falls down face first onto the floor. Cam watches him uncertainly, nudging Kreider’s leg with one foot, trying to decide if he needs to get him up.

“Too tired for porn tonight, sorry,” Kreider mumbles, and he sounds amusingly sincere. 

“Alright, well, if you’re not putting out, I’m leaving.”

Kreider waves a hand dismissively. 

“See you tomorrow,” he says, half-unconscious already. Cam tosses the keys onto Kreider’s couch, and makes his way out of the room, back to the elevator, down to the lobby. 

It’s been a hell of a night, he thinks, wearily, rubbing at his forehead with two fingers, and this is really just the beginning. They have a lot of games ahead of them - Kreider probably more than he does, and tonight was a party they couldn’t really afford. Hangovers make for shitty practices, and he isn’t looking forward to the next day. Tonight was a satisfying victory…but this is just the beginning.


	2. A Mess You'd Wear With Pride

Kreider awakens in the morning to the stunning (and painful) realization that hangovers are a real thing, not just something people invented to scare college students off alcohol. He can’t remember ever feeling quite like this. His mouth is dry, his head is spinning around in a dizzy circle of pain, and his neck aches (although that might just be from the angle he was at, lying on the floor and all). It doesn’t take him long to piece together what happened the night before - he remembers being in a cab with Cam, and he remembers hitting the floor. 

Nice of Cam to look after him like that, he thinks, but couldn’t he have left some advil or a bottle of water or something? Staggering to his feet, Kreider barely makes it to his kitchen before he’s bolting for the bathroom, emptying the contents of his stomach into the toilet. Once it’s passed, he rocks back onto his ass, letting his head fall back to rest against the bathroom wall, closing his eyes for a moment as the blood pools back into the other parts of his body from where it’s all rushed to his head. A thought strikes him, and he looks down at his watch.

“Shit,” he mutters, realizing exactly how long he has before he’s supposed to be at practice. He drags himself off of the floor and calls a cab as he trudges into his bedroom. As changes into fresh clothes, he’s still not sure whether going to practice is even a good idea…but he doesn’t want to give anybody the impression that he’s the kind of player to let a little success go to his head, make him complacent. Reluctantly, he makes his way down to the street and flops into the back of the cab.

When he skates onto the ice, he hates everything. The nausea’s gone away, but his head is still a wreck, and while the cool air wafting upwards from the rink helps a little, every scrape, every clatter of a stick being dropped, echoes inside of his skull. He can’t quite focus on anything, and he knows he’s playing like shit, but nobody really says anything because they all know why. 

Even Vigneault isn’t too harsh on him. Not as harsh as Tortorella would have been, anyway. He gets exasperated when Chris makes stupid mistakes, but he could be yelling a lot louder, and Chris appreciates it. When they break, he takes a moment, leaning forward and trying to catch his breath. He thinks everyone’s left the ice, but he hears skates behind him and turns to see Talbot moving towards him. 

“Hang in there, kiddo,” Cam says, resting a glove on his shoulder for a brief second. “I don’t wanna start without you Monday night. Come on, let’s get you hydrated.”

Kreider gulps back a mouthful of the bitter mingled tastes of hangover and hard work, and ducks his head in a nod.

“Could’ve left me a bottle of water or something last night,” he manages, one corner of his mouth quirking upward in a  grin. Cam pushes him, just hard enough to get in front of him leaving the ice.

“I’m not your babysitter,” he points out. “I got you home.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Chris mutters, and then immediately feels bad because Cam is right, he did get him home, something Kreider himself hadn’t put a lot of thought into when he was downing that fifth shot. “Thanks,” he mumbles, feeling obligated to add that on.

“You’d do it for me,” Cam shrugs. It isn’t a question, it’s a statement of fact and they both know it. 

Kreider pulls himself together after lunch; he feels a lot better with food in him, and the practice isn’t a total wash. But all the practice they can possibly do in a day doesn’t save them on Monday night. It’s brutal, and when they trudge off of the ice afterward, Chris can’t think of anything to say to make five to two taste any better. He gives Cam a reassuring pat on the back, but there isn’t much talk after the meeting. 

“You want to get a drink?” Chris offers, because the game is done, there’s nothing more to say about it, and he thinks they could both use something to take their minds off of it. Cam shakes his head.

“Nah. Think I’m just gonna hang out here for a few, then head home. Have a good time, though.”

Chris tries to figure out whether that’s Cam-talk for ‘I would like a drink but I would rather stay here and feel guilty and kick myself for letting my team down, you should probably talk me out of it’ or if Cam really just wants to be left alone.

“You sure?” he asks, and Cam nods.

“Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“‘Kay.” Chris shrugs, and meanders out.

 -

Cam stays for a while in the locker room. He’s not sure how long…long enough to replay every moment of that damned game in his mind, long enough to try to work out how he could have stopped every one of those goals. He sits on the bench, and grabs his mask, pulling it into his lap, wiping a smudge off of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man with his right thumb, tracing his fingertips over the smooth surface of it, up to the crown of the front. 

Kreider kissed him there, the night they won against Columbus, and that night they beat the Canucks. Cam’s not sure why he’s remembering that now, not sure why that comes to mind tonight of all nights. Because he feels so fucking guilty, maybe. Because Kreider is so happy when they win, when they all play well together, so happy that he does stupid shit like kissing his goalie on the helmet. It is with no small amount of surprise that Cam realizes his guilt is more the result of him letting _Chris_ down than it is the result of him having a shitty night. He's not sure where this self-inflicted burden of protection has come from, maybe that's just what friendship is, looking out for each other, but for some reason, he feels like it's his job, his job to make sure Kreider doesn't go home looking dejected, to make sure Kreider gets safely back to his place instead of winding up passed out in a cab somewhere in New York City.

Cam looks down at his mask again, and stupidly wonders if Kreider’s ever gotten drunk enough to kiss another guy - like a real, lips and tongues kiss, not just a victory-drunk act of friendship and mutual admiration.

This curiosity is very strange and new, not because it’s something he’s never felt before - he’s had crushes, of course, but it’s never, ever been directed towards another guy, much less one he plays with. Why is he thinking about this now? Why didn’t this come to mind before, when they were in Hartford? They’ve known each other plenty of time for him to have thought these things before, but he can honestly say that in this particular moment, he imagines for the first time what it would feel like if he weren’t wearing the mask. He puts his fingers up to his own forehead, and touches his skin.

For a moment, he closes his eyes and thinks about it - Kreider’s lips on his skin, on his forehead, where he can feel his own cold fingertips pressing against his skull, down to his neck, where-

His eyes snap open at the sudden first feeling of a surge of blood between his legs, and he stands up, straightening his pants desperately, pulling his shirt down, eyes wide. No, no, no. This is not good. He needs to go home, needs to watch some porn, some really solid penis-in-vagina man-on-woman porn and jerk off to it because he’s having crazy thoughts and maybe it’s because he hasn’t gotten laid in months but it is _not okay_ to sit in the locker room and think about what your friend and star forward’s mouth would feel like on your face.

He grabs his bag, and puts his mask away, glaring at it and dragging his hand across the top of it, wiping at the surface of it as if it were the mask’s fault for making him think unclean thoughts, because it still has Kreider’s fucking kiss on it.

And that’s the night that Cam Talbot starts to look the other way.


	3. If I Am Lost

Cam looks the other way when he wakes up hard after some dream he can’t remember any part of with the exception of dark hair and dark eyes and the number twenty, when he can’t seem to get the image out of his mind.

He looks the other way when Kreider kisses his mask again after they beat Minnesota, and refrains from saying _damn it, I haven’t even gotten the other ones off yet._

He looks the other way when Kreider is the first person off of the bench, flying across the ice in a blur of limbs and speed after Cam nails his first NHL shootout.

And at no point does any of this looking away involve him actually physically looking anywhere else. No, his eyes are locked right on Chris as he flails over the boards off of the bench and rockets towards him, because he _can’t_ look away. What he looks away from is his own increasingly inappropriate thoughts, the questions his mind asks that it really shouldn’t. He shoves the thoughts to the back of his mind, suppresses the questions, but it feels like trying not to throw up; you can choke it back for a while but eventually it just all comes out whether you want it to or not. 

He rationalizes it in his mind - it makes sense that he and Chris would be close. They’ve played together for a long time. 

But it’s a contradiction, an ages-old contradiction - the more you try not to think about something, the more you find yourself thinking about it. That one moment, that one stupid moment in the locker room, the one when Chris wasn’t even there, the one when he thought that stupid thing completely unprovoked, it’s fucked everything up. Thrown off his entire rhythm.

The worst thing…or maybe it’s the best, Cam isn’t quite sure which…is that he has plenty of reasons to shrug it off, dismiss the little moments between them. It isn’t like Chris isn’t affectionate with the rest of the team, not like he and Cam share something unique and beautiful, right? They’re all like that. They’re hockey players, they’re physical, they smack each other on the head and hug with ferocity that would crush small children. And they kiss each other’s helmets. So yes…the worst part about it is that he has absolutely no reason to be thinking it at all, and a million reasons to shrug it off and chide himself for acting like a teenaged girl with a crush.

That’s exactly what happens, though. He tenses up when Chris gets close to him, not really visibly, not like he can’t move, he just…feels his pulse quicken a little bit because he suddenly finds himself wanting to grab Chris by the front of his shirt and say _I’m not going to let you down tonight, I promise._ It’s happened several times lately, and he-

“Hey. Hey. Earth to Talbot.” 

Cam looks up from his gloves quickly.

“Shit, Steps, you startled me,” he says, laughing unevenly. “I was just, uh,” he gestures with his gloves, like waving them upwards explains perfectly what he was doing.

“Yeah, staring at your hands. I saw. Good work, your skills are unparalleled.”

“Smartass.” Cam mutters, taking a swing at Stepan with one of the gloves. Stepan dodges it easily, and the glove slides across the floor, landing at Kreider’s feet. He considers going to get it, decides against it, and looks back at Stepan. “What’s up?”

“Are you coming tonight?”

Cam’s stare must have been exceptionally blank, because Stepan immediately rolls his eyes.

“To the party. At Cally’s.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I’ll be there.”

“You driving, or you want to share a cab?” That’s Kreider, and Cam wants to sigh loudly but somehow manages to hold it back. He can’t catch a break, can he? Try not to think about Kreider, Kreider wants to drive around the city with him. That’s not fair, he knows, regretting the thought instantly. Chris is his friend, asking him for a ride. It’s not his fault Cam’s slowly becoming a head case.

“Was going to take a cab, figured there’d be drinks.” he says, casually. “We can share it.”

“Cool,” Kreider says, and he looks away, back to taping his stick, like there’s nothing to it.

That’s because there _is_ nothing to it, Cam tells himself. God, he’s turned into such an asshole, obsessing over this one stupid thought, sabotaging the best friendship he has over some really dumb experimental thought that he should have gotten out of his system back in college, when people experiment with these things. 

He doesn’t want to deal with it, he just doesn’t. Later, as he buttons up his shirt and straightens his hair, he thinks of the evening ahead, the cab ride over, the small talk, the drinks, the buzz in his mind if he lets himself drink, and he doesn’t want any of it at all. He leans on the bathroom counter, stares at his reflection.

“You,” he says to his own face, “Are a huge dick.” It’s a shitty thing to do, to back out of a party, but Cam just doesn’t think he has it in him tonight. He picks up his phone, and texts Kreider.

_Not going to make it, think I’m coming down with something. Can you get a ride?_

As soon as he sends it, he hates himself even more. He’s standing up his teammates, missing out on a good time, because he can’t get his own stupid awkward feelings out of his head. It takes a few minutes for Chris to text him back. 

_K. Feel better dude._

Cam texts him back _\- Will do -_ and shoves his phone into his pocket, then unbuttons the shirt he’s just put on, shrugging it off of his shoulders, leaving on the white undershirt he’s wearing beneath it. He changes back into sweatpants, and throws himself down onto the couch in his living room miserably.

He’s halfway through an episode of _Deadliest Catch_ when the doorbell rings. Frowning, he wonders if he ordered a pizza or something and forgot about it, but he gets up, walking to the door with the tv remote still in his hand. He slides the chain on the door, and opens it up, and finds himself face to face with Chris Kreider. 

He’s carrying a brown paper bag, wearing a grey button-up with the top two buttons undone, halfway tucked into his jeans, and his dark hair is doing _something_ rebelling against the gel he’s put in it, and he looks totally ready to go to a party, not to be standing at Cam’s front door. Not that he stays at the door long, he comes barging right in, setting the bag down on Cam’s kitchen table and pulling bottles out of it.

“I got you Dayquil,” he says brusquely, “And Nyquil, wasn’t sure which you’d want. Oh, and I got JD. Figured if you couldn’t come to the party, I’d bring the party to you.”

“What?” Cam says, eloquently. Kreider, still holding the bottle of Jack Daniel's, closes the distance between them and puts his hand to Cam’s forehead.

“Yeah,” he agrees, “you feel a little warm.”

Well, that’s no wonder, Cam thinks, feeling like his face is on fire. This isn’t happening, this can’t be happening. If he felt like a shitty person before, it’s even worse now. He’s bailed on a party to avoid his best friend, and now said friend has just shown up at his apartment to bring him booze and meds. 

“How do you feel?” Chris asks, peering at him with concerned eyes. Cam closes his, because the close proximity isn’t helping with the flaming in his cheeks. How does he feel? If that isn’t a loaded question…and now he has to pretend like he’s actually sick because if he’s not sick, he’s just a dick. A total dick who Chris Kreider is skipping a team party to take care of.

“Like shit,” he says, honestly, and moves back to the couch as Chris starts poking through his kitchen cabinets. 

“Hey, do shots with me,” Kreider says, pulling down a couple of glasses and twisting open the bottle of Jack. 

“Oh, no…” Cam breathes, too low for Chris to hear. Shots. That’s exactly what he needs. But when Chris sets the bottle of whiskey down on the coffee table and takes a seat on the couch next to him, thrusting the cup towards him, he finds himself taking it, because maybe if he just drinks and then passes out, Chris will leave and he won’t have to deal with this.

Kreider holds up his glass, and Cam clinks his against it obligingly before they mirror each other in downing the contents of the glasses. The whiskey burns going down, fiery and acid in his chest as he swallows, and he closes his eyes for a moment. He hears Chris pour another round into his own glass, then feels Chris’s fingers brush against his as he takes the glass out of Cam’s hand before replacing it, weighted down with more liquid.

“I’m just gonna pass out soon,” he says, opening his eyes.

“Yeah, that’s cool, I might head over to the party after you do. Just thought it was pretty shitty for you to have to be here by yourself when you’re sick and everybody else is off partying.”

Cam knows he should say thank you or something, but he can’t find the words, so instead, he swallows the second round of whiskey. It doesn’t burn as bad this time, and he reaches forward to set the glass down on the coffee table. 

“What are you watching?” Chris asks, grabbing at the remote. Cam lets him have it. “Oh, come on, man, that’s not gonna make you feel better. “Watch something like…I don’t know, pick a movie.”

“I don’t care,” Cam shrugs. “It was just noise, so it wouldn’t be so quiet in here.”

“I can make noise,” Chris offers. “You wanna talk about stuff?”

Cam eyes him warily.

“What stuff?”

“I don’t know. Just stuff. Hockey. Cars. Whatever.”

“Kreids,” Cam sighs, resting his head in his right hand. “I’m just…I don’t feel good.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Kreider apologizes so quickly that Cam feels his I’m-an-asshole feelings deepening to a whole new level. “I’ll just put something on.” He flips through channels, and settles on some action film, something mindless, background noise. Cam glues his eyes to the screen, because if he’s watching the movie, he doesn’t have to look at Chris. Doesn’t have to see the concern in his friend’s eyes, over a sickness he doesn’t even have. A few moments of silence pass as a particularly intense action sequence goes by, then Chris pours another pair of shots. Against his better judgement, Cam reaches for it, holds it to his lips…smells the acrid vapor of the alcohol…swallows, fights the urge to cough, then glances over at Kreider.

Chris is leaning forward, elbows resting on his knees, looking over at him, and their eyes lock onto each other’s. Cam freezes. He hasn’t even had but three shots, and the third is still just now burning a trail down his esophagus, but he feels his world spin, and he can’t move.

“You okay?” Chris asks, and Cam knows he should nod or something, but he just can’t. Can’t do anything, because his eyes are locked on Kreider’s and he can’t pull them away for any amount of money in the world and that moment right there is the moment he knows he’s really lost. Because in that moment he’s not thinking about Kreider kissing his helmet, not thinking about what a drunken kiss would feel like, he’s thinking about bodies pressed close together, warmth, pressure, strong arms wrapped around him, what Kreider’s eyes would look like at half mast, half-closed in desire and adoration, and he has to get away, has to get off of this couch. He lets out a noise of dismay, a sort of half-cry, half-groan, and he scrambles to his feet, moving to the window, struggling with the latch, and throws it open, thrusting his head out into the evening, gasping for cold, clean, December air into his lungs.

“Dude, are you okay?” Kreider is behind him, resting a hand on his back, and Cam turns around, faces him, takes one breath, and backs Chris into the back of the couch. Kreider is so close, Cam can feel his breath on his face, feel the solidity of muscular thighs against his own.

“What..um,” Chris manages, before Cam leans in and kisses him. 

The kiss is short-lived - Cam can taste the whiskey on Kreider’s lips, can smell the aftershave on his skin, and he can swear that Chris breathes a moan into his mouth, sending tiny vibrations through his lips into his very soul, but before he can really settle into the moment, Kreider’s hands are on his chest, pushing him away, and Cam is standing there, bitter regret coursing through his veins. Because how could he have _done_ that, how could he have actually acted on that stupid impulse? Chris stares at him for a good solid five seconds, then he’s grabbing his coat from the back of the couch and bolting for the door, and suddenly, Cam is alone.


	4. I Take More Than I Can Give

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the sake of today's little chapter of fiction, we're assuming that Cally has a new house! Congratulations, Cally! :P
> 
> Chapter title taken from "How To Live" by Band of Horses
> 
> :*

Kreider is halfway down the hall before he even hears the door slam shut behind him, that's how quickly he's moving. He pulls his coat on robotically, going through the motions because the familiar routine is the only thing holding him to the earth at the moment. The thoughts in his mind, they aren't even words. They're not coherent, they're just heat and fire and denial and longing, blurred together into a thousand sensations and memories of moments that come over him wave after wave until he bursts out of the building into the street, lifting his arm desperately to hail a cab. He's not on a main road, though, and there are no cabs, so he starts down the sidewalk towards the increased traffic at the end of the road, finally managing to flag a taxi down after a moment of intently searching the stream of cars on the cross street.

He's in the back of the cab, and he's already given the driver the address when he finally manages to pull together a fragment of a sensible thought, and the first one that comes to mind is what kind of shape he's just left Cam in. Shit, Cam probably thinks he's crossed every line there ever was, thinks he's wrecked their friendship, all kinds of godawful things, and Chris can't blame him. If he'd done that, if he'd gone and kissed somebody and they took off running the way he's just done, he'd probably be so sick to his stomach he'd quit the team and run away to Australia or something.

But he can't go back. He can't. If he goes back there, he's going to do things that really _would_ change everything, cross every line, even if he's not sure what those things would be, whether there would be fists involved or words or...something else. So instead, he's going...wait, is he still going to the party? Yes, it was definitely Cally's address he gave the driver. That's where he should go, where he has to go, because everyone's expecting him and he promised them that he was coming after he dropped by to check on Cam. He can't very well text them and say _Sorry guys, can't make it, Cam kissed me and I'm all fucked up._

The ride over does little to improve his composure, and by the time he gets out of the car and walks up the steps to knock on the door, he tries to pull himself together. Whatever buzz he'd gotten from the three shots of whiskey is long gone, shaken out of his system by the cold and the adrenaline coursing through him, and he's just fine with that. He's done drinking for a while, he thinks.

"Kreiderrrrrrrrrr!" It's G who opens the door, and Chris steps inside, into the warmth of the main room. Most of the guys are there; there's a poker game going on between five of them, which Girardi returns to as soon as he's closed the door behind him. "You can join in when we're done," he offers, but Kreider shrugs.

"'S'alright. What else is going on?"

"Uh..." G says, surveying his cards. "Cally's in the kitchen being a domestic goddess. Hags and DZ are playing with the Wii." He gestures towards the door leading out of the living room. "Okay, somebody fucked with my cards. I had a..."

Kreider realizes he's lost Girardi's attention there at the end, but it's alright, he's gotten a little direction as far as the anatomy of the party, and meanders around the corner into the kitchen. Cally's there, leaning half into the oven, and Chris waits for him to come out before he says anything, not wanting to startle him into baking his face or anything.

"Hey man," Cally greets him, extracting a large tray from the oven with a potholder. "You just get here?"

Kreider nods, glancing at the tray, and can't help but think that Girardi was using the term "goddess" a little loosely - it's just a tray of bagel bites, not some gourmet invention.

"Yeah, wasn't too much traffic," he says, grabbing at some potato chips in a bowl on the counter.

"How's Cam?"

"Fine." Kreider answers, entirely too quickly. If Cally notices, though, he doesn't say anything.

"You want a beer to go with those?" he asks, gesturing towards the chips.

"Nah," Kreider shakes his head. "You got coke, water, whatever?"

"Yeah, there's cokes in the fridge. You on the wagon now or what?" Cally teases, then grabs another tray of still-frozen bagel bites and shoves them into the oven.

"Something like that," Kreider mumbles, opening the refrigerator and grabbing a can of coke.

“I gotta go check on the chicken. Can you bring that pan?” Cally gestures towards a large metal deep dish pan sitting on top of the microwave, then grabs his beer from beside the sink, and heads out his back door. Kreider grabs the pan and follows after him, stepping through the sliding glass door out onto the patio.

“Like your new place,” he comments. He sets the pan down on the table next to the grill as Cally opens the lid and starts poking at foil-wrapped packets of chicken with the tongs he brought from the kitchen.

“It’s home,” he says, in that rather matter-of-fact way he has. Kreider cracks open his can of coke and takes a sip. It’s cold and the carbonation stings on his lips, and he wipes a hand across his mouth quickly, darting away an excess drop or two of soda that spilled over the edge of the full can. His own fingers on his lips are warm in the cool air, warm like Cam’s were less than an hour earlier when he…

Kreider chokes on his mouthful of soda, barely having time to lean over the patio rail before it spews out of his face, nearly coming up his nose. Cally looks over at him in concern.

“You alright?” he asks, setting the tongs down. “You’re not getting sick, too, are you? Cam give you something?”

“No,” Kreider wheezes and shakes his head. _Yeah, Cally, you don’t wanna know what he gave me._ “Just tried to breathe coke, that’s all.”

“Careful,” Cally warns. “Need your lungs intact. You sure you don’t want a drink or anything?”

“I’m fine,” Kreider assures him. “I, uh, I had a couple drinks at Cam’s.”

“Well, I hope you swallowed.”

Kreider chokes again.

“ _What_!?”

Cally gives him a strange look.

“I hope you swallowed the drinks. Instead of breathing them. Like you just did.”

Kreider feels red flushing up across his neck onto his face, and hopes that the dim lighting is enough to conceal it. His mind is jumping to really strange places, but it's not like Cally needs to know that.

"What's going on with you?" Cally asks, "You're all weird tonight. Weirder than usual. Since when don't you drink?"

There's a reason Cally's captain of this team, Chris thinks. Not just because of his skill on the ice, but because he can read people, because he's in tune with his team. Chris has been here all of twenty minutes or so, and Cally can already tell that something's up with him. It's remarkable. And also very inconvenient, seeing as Kreider is not at all in the mood to talk about what happened at Cam's place, which is obviously the root of his strange behavior. He knows, he just _knows_ that if he says nothing's wrong, Cally will know he's lying. So he tells the truth.

"I don't wanna talk about it," he says, in what he hopes are stern, manly, that's-that-leave-me-alone tones. Cally frowns, and Chris can practically see the gears turning inside of his head as he tries to put some pieces together and formulate a guess.

"Is Cam alright?" he ventures. "Shit, is he actually really sick? He doesn't have pneumonia or ebola or something, does he? I swear, if he's-"

"He's _fine_!" Chris says, too forcefully for the second time that night, and instantly knows that hasn't helped his case at all. "Look, he just-" He looks around, making sure the door is closed, making sure none of the other guys have come out and stood behind them or anything, then lowers his voice. "Look, Cally, it's nothing. Nothing we can't work out."

Cally pulls open the corner of one of the little foil packets of chicken on the grill, and apparently decides that it's done, because he starts pulling all of them off of the grill and putting them into the pan he had Chris bring out.

"Did you guys fight over something? Girl or something?"

Chris lets out a sound that can only be described as a nervous giggle, high-pitched and unexpected. If only it were that simple, that normal.

"No." he says, shaking his head.

"Okay." Cally says, not pressing any further, just...waiting. Kreider grabs the beer out of his hand and takes a long sip. Cally freezes, his hand still curved around the shape of the beer bottle that isn't there anymore.

"Yeah..." he says slowly. "You're just fine. That's obvious."

Kreider hands his beer back apologetically, and Cally waves a hand.

"No, man, keep it. You clearly need it more than I do. Listen, you don't have to tell me, I'll let it go, I just need to know if it's gonna affect the team, you know?"

Kreider leans on the rail and nods miserably.

"He..." The words sound so ridiculous, and like such a betrayal at the same time. Like he's betraying Cam's trust by telling Cally. But suddenly, _not_ telling Cally seems equally shitty because Kreider knows he's right, that whether they want it to or not, this _is_ going to affect the team if Chris can't get his head around it and move on. "He fuckin' kissed me, man."

Cally's just lifted the pan off of the table when Chris finally spits it out, and he sets it right back down again, then looks at Chris and bursts out laughing. Kreider flushes angrily.

"It isn't _funny_!" he protests.

"Sorry," Cally chuckles, "Your face is just...sorry, did you say _kissed_?"

"Yeah, Cally, like, full, right on the lips, steal your soul out through your mouth _kissed_."

"You sound impressed. That good?"

The violent blush that has Kreider's cheeks on fire doesn't fade with the question.

"It isn't about whether it was good. I mean, we play together, we can't...date, or something."

"Did he ask you to date him? Propose or anything?"

Kreider is starting to feel a little silly.

"No, no, he just..."

"What did he say?"

"He said he didn't feel good."

"No, I mean, after he kissed you."

"I didn't really...I mean, I left."

"Without saying anything?"

"Yes! I was freaked out!"

There's a moment of silence, and Cally picks the pan of food back up.

"Because he kissed you, or because you liked it?"

Kreider takes another swig of his stolen beer, which, being beer, is doing absolutely nothing to take the edge off of the situation.

"I didn't _like_ it."

"You just described it as a 'steal your soul out through your mouth' kiss. That sounds pretty positive to me."

"I don't have time to deal with this shit, that's all!" Kreider exclaims. "I got games to play. Goals to score. I don't have time to start fooling around with my goalie."

Someone clears their throat behind the two of them, and Kreider jumps about a foot in the air, turning to see who it is.

"It's alright," Hank says, "My schedule's pretty booked up anyway."

It's obvious from the crooked grin on Hank's face that he's heard enough to know that Kreider wasn't referring to him, that he's only teasing, but that doesn't stop Chris from feeling like he wants to jump off the patio. Cally chuckles.

"Hank, anything you just heard..."

"Stays between the three of us, don't worry." Hank nods. "I just came out because the guys were wondering where the food was."

"There's bagel bites on the kitchen counter, and the chicken is coming in a minute."

"Should I leave you two to...discuss...then?" Hank gestures towards them. Kreider shakes his head, feeling flustered and glad for a way out.

"No. We were done." He presses towards the door, and Cally catches him by the arm for a second.

"You have to talk to him," he tells Chris, definitively. "You can't bring this to the ice, you know that."

"Yeah," Kreider mumbles miserably. "I know. I'll...I'll talk to him tomorrow before practice or something."

Cally doesn't say anything after that, but he takes the chicken and heads inside, so Kreider assumes they have an agreement.

The only problem is...he doesn't want to talk to Cam before practice, he doesn't want to talk about it at all. He wants to forget that it happened because the more he thinks about it, the more reasons he comes up with to blame himself, and the more questions he has.

 


	5. I Know You Tried, I Know You're Cursed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fun Fact: I wrote a chunk of the porn for this and it's like four times longer than the normal chapters. Ah, joy. Now I have to lead up to it believably. 
> 
> Chapter title from "St. Augustine" by Band of Horses

Strangely enough, Cam doesn’t feel as utterly hopeless once Chris is gone as Chris’s imagination might have led him to believe. He feels…relieved. Somehow, getting that impulse out of his system makes the unbearable curiosity subside slightly. 

He regrets it immediately, of course, acting on something that shouldn’t even have been a dirty thought in his head. It’s a terrible, shitty thing to do, to give your friend and teammate a kiss he didn’t ask for, and from the looks of his reaction, didn’t want. He feels terrible about it, and the guilt is only compounded by the fact that he knows it’s made him feel a little better himself. Better in the sense that he’s no longer strung like a live wire with the heat of _needing to know_ , and is instead now burdened with the thought that he’s fucked up one of the best friendships he’s ever had. 

He can fix this, he thinks. He’ll tell Chris tomorrow at practice that he’s sorry, that he was really feeling very sick and feverish and has no idea what he was thinking. He drinks about double the recommended dose of Nyquil, and manages to fall asleep an hour or two later in his bed.

He wakes up the next day entirely too early, but as soon as he’s awake, he knows he isn’t going to be able to fall back asleep. Consulting the clock on his nightstand, he realizes he has a good three hours before he needs to be at practice, and he closes his eyes, trying to will himself to catch another hour or so of rest, but it just ends up being boring, so he swings his feet over the edge of the bed and gets up. 

The thing about being a professional athlete, he thinks to himself, is that he can’t just hide from work or call out sick like people in other occupations. He can say he’s not feeling well, but then they’ll insist he get checked out, and obviously there’s nothing physically wrong with him, he’s just dreading the inevitable awkwardness that’s going to be there between him and Kreider. His mind is clearer, though, than it was before. For as much as he’s dreading practice today, he’s also relieved that he doesn’t have to go around hiding his inappropriate questions anymore. If Chris didn’t pick anything up from Cam’s awkwardness before, he’s certainly got a clear picture of it now. There’s not really anything to hide, at least, just pieces to pick up.

He spends the ride to the rink trying to put together the beginning of the conversation he knows they have to have. _Hey, man, sorry about last night. Wasn’t really thinking straight._ That sounds more like something he’d say if they’d gotten into a fist fight. _Hey, Chris, about last night…I was really feeling sick, wasn’t myself. Friends?_ Ugh. There’s really just no good way to apologize for kissing someone.

As it turns out, the words come to him when he runs into Kreider on his way into the locker room. Kreider is just coming out, fully geared up, and Cam is going in, still in street clothes, and they freeze for a second, eyes meeting then glancing away quickly.

“Hey,” Cam says, and Kreider moves as if to walk away. Cam grabs him by the arm, and Kreider lets out a huff of breath.

“Please let go,” he says quietly.

“Last night,” Cam persists. “I was out of line. I’m sorry.”  

Kreider shakes his hand off. 

“We can talk about it after practice,” he mumbles, then hurries off to the ice, leaving Cam to gear up in the near-silence of the locker room. No one is talking much, and Cam suspects they all might have partied a little too hard the night before. There’s quiet chatter, but no loud, raucous noise like they usually produce. Cam changes quickly, and makes his way out onto the ice. Practice goes remarkably well, considering the variables in play; he and Kreider manage to avoid any awkward glances and keep their heads in the actual game. The holiday break seems to have done everybody some good, and they all skate with a little more energy.

Cam knows he should be paying more attention during the discussion after practice, but his mind, which he managed to keep so keenly focused on the exercises, begins to wander. Kreider didn’t just seem weirded out by the situation earlier, looking back on it, Cam thinks he seemed _angry_. And maybe he has a right to be angry…it was a really stupid, selfish thing to do, after all. He should have said something, at least warned him. Maybe discussed things with him, then they could have laughed it off together. Anything but just acting on the stupid impulse to plant a kiss on him. He makes up his mind to apologize as soon as the meeting is-

Oh, the meeting is through, he realizes, startling out of his reverie. The other guys have already started leaving, and if Vigneault noticed him being a million miles away, he doesn’t say anything as the group disperses. 

“Get some rest, and I’ll see you all in Washington,” is the last thing their coach says as they wander off to their own destinations. Cam doesn’t move at first, just sits on the bench, and wonders if Kreider will actually follow through on his earlier promise of a discussion. He doesn’t see the pointed glance that Cally gives Kreider before leaving, but he does see Kreider cross the room a few seconds later to take a seat on the bench across from him.

“Didn’t mean to-“ Kreider begins, just as Cam starts with “I’m sorry for-“ They chuckle uneasily, and Cam gestures with one hand towards Chris.

“You first,” he says. Gives him a few seconds to put together coherent sentences, anyway.

“I was just gonna say, I didn’t mean to snap at you earlier. Just didn’t want…stuff…to get in my head before practice, you know?”

“Yeah. Look, Chris, I’m really…Last night was really stupid of me. I don’t want you to think I’m…” He lets the sentence trail off, hoping that Kreider will fill the end of it in for him, but Kreider remains silent and expectant. “That I’m trying to start anything. I wasn’t feeling good, I was on some meds already, and I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

Kreider nods slowly.

“Mhm. I believe that. I just wanna know…I mean, maybe I don’t wanna know, but I have to ask…Is there stuff we need to talk about?”

Stuff we need to talk about. Cam considers that for a split second. He’s not _in love_ with Kreider or anything outrageous. It was a stupid, maddening curiosity that made him do it, not like he’s been suppressing feelings of adoration for Chris for decades.   

“Not really,” he shakes his head. “It was a one-time thing. I was…I don’t know, I was curious.”

“About kissing dudes?”

Cam smiles slightly.

“Guess you could say that.”

“Jeez, and there wasn’t a single other guy on the team you could’ve tried it on?”

“It was…personal.”

Chris shifts uncomfortably and tugs at his hair. 

“You mean with…feelings?”

He looks so distasteful when he says the word, like it actually offends him, that it makes Cam laugh.

“Just a curiosity, directed specifically at you.”

That doesn’t seem to make Chris feel much better, but he nods once.

“Are you, uh…still curious?”

Cam knows the right answer to that one, even if it’s not an entirely honest answer.

“Nah. I’m good.”

Kreider nods again.

“‘Kay then. We’re cool.” He offers a hand, and Cam shakes it firmly. He can manage from here, he thinks. He and Chris are close, close enough to get over something stupid like an ill-advised kiss. He’ll keep the kiss as a memory, as the answer to the question he once was brave and stupid enough to steal an answer to, and he won’t worry about whether or not Chris will still kiss his mask if they win Friday night in Washington.

For Cam Talbot, the conversation comes with some small amount of closure.

For Chris Kreider, the conversation marks the beginning of a spiral of uncertainty.


	6. Failure Times Two Breeds Contempt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love all of you who have stopped by to read this so much :D
> 
> Further notes - this is, if you haven't noticed, taking place during the current NHL season, but I may depart from reality later on if the outcome of games and such doesn't fit my plot :P I CAN DO THAT, I'M A WRITER.
> 
> I'm also hoping I'll be able to finish this story at the rate I've been updating it so far...it's sort of consumed my brain and left me with no muse to write anything else, so I need to get it out!
> 
> Title for this chapter is from "Cigarettes, Wedding Bands" (still) by Band of Horses.

 

Despite their attempts at clearing the air, the game in Washington doesn’t go according to plan at all. They don’t play terribly, but Cam starts for the third game in a row and maybe it’s the pressure that gets to him. He lets in a couple of pretty soft goals, ones he knows he’ll kick himself for later. The Rangers stay in the game and own the ice for the better part of a couple of periods, but in the end, it’s the Caps who come away with the win.

Cam tries not to let his frustration show - at least, in the aftermath, he doesn’t have to worry about whether or not Chris is going to come over and kiss his mask because Chris only does that when they win. There’s a bright spot in the dark, he supposes.

He’s tired - not just from starting three games in a row, he had a good-sized break in between the last two, after all, but from the mental effort he’s been putting into keeping his head in the game lately. Emotional distress is even more exhausting than physical effort.

He doesn’t put much deliberate thought into it anymore, or at least, he tries not to. It's just something that's always there, weighing on his consciousness somewhere in the back. The one thing he didn’t tell Chris, the one question that Chris, to his surprise, didn’t ask when they’d talked things over, was how Cam had felt about the kiss, once he’d acted on his burning curiosity. He’s glad Kreider hadn’t brought it up. He isn’t sure how he would have answered it. Honestly, he had enjoyed it, and it probably would have been fairly obvious if he’d pretended he hadn’t. If he had lied about it, said something like _well, it was just a kiss, I wasn’t actually all that impressed,_ he was pretty sure Chris would have been able to see right through it.

There’s no sense on dwelling on it, though. Even if Cam enjoyed the kiss in its brevity, Chris had made it clear that he wasn’t looking to repeat the experience. He's been uncomfortable talking about it, has said nothing positive about it, and had gone tearing out the door at the time, so it's obvious he isn't pining away for another round. Cam isn’t about to fuck up their seemingly successful attempt at smoothing over the situation by probing for more information. Especially not after a loss like that. After that, he’s content to just go back to the hotel and get some sleep before their flight to Florida.

He throws himself down on the hotel bed a couple of hours later, after the post game interviews and after showering at the arena, and wraps his arms around the pillow, burying his face in it. He knows his still-damp hair is leaving soggy imprints in the pillowcase, but that’s one of the joys of staying in hotel rooms; there are at least three other pillows on the bed that he can grab if this one gets wet.

He hears Hank come into the room, or at least, he hears the door lock click open and assumes it’s Hank since he’s the only one with a key to this particular suite. He turns his head to the side slightly, so he can see over the pillow with one eye, and finds that he is correct. He lets out a grunt, the best greeting he can muster up at the moment, and Hank lifts a hand in a slight wave in return as he begins to go about his routine.

Cam is in his boxers and a tshirt, and that's what he usually sleeps in, but when Hank comes out of the bathroom, he's wearing actual pajamas, which are unsurprisingly fashionable. By then, Cam's rolled over onto his back and has his phone out in front of him, suffering through the highlight reel of the game that's already popped up on the Caps website. It's funny, how perfectly clear the saves he should have made become when he watches it from the outside.

"Shouldn't do that," Hank says, settling into his own bed. "You'll only distract yourself from the next game."

Cam lets the hand holding his phone fall, so the phone is face down on his chest.

"Couldn't get much worse," he points out.

"Don't be stupid," Hank says easily. "Of course it could." He dismisses it so smoothly, he always does, although Cam has to admit that Hank's accent lends itself easily to saying things smoothly. "You shouldn't be so hard on yourself."

"It's hard not to be," Cam sighs.

"I know that," Hank comes back, and Cam feels silly. Of course Hank knows that. Better than he does. Hank is...Hank. People expect the supernatural from him, expect him to be perfect. And now they're starting to expect things from Cam too, although he can't imagine being under the amount of pressure Hank is every time he starts a game. "But it's not going to help."

"It's what makes me better," Cam persists. Hank shakes his head, digging into his bag and pulling out some kind of magazine. It has a really well-dressed couple in a fancy boat on the front, and Cam's too far away to read the title to figure out whether it's a fashion magazine, a boating magazine, or maybe both. _Fashionable Boating Weekly_ , that sounds like the kind of thing Hank would read. He puts his feet up under the blankets and opens the magazine.

"No, what makes you better is taking your mistakes and learning from them. Not dwelling on them and losing sleep over them."

Cam knows Hank is right, and he appreciates the advice, he just can't really help the self-blame sometimes, especially not after games that close. If the guys hadn't tried so hard, if they hadn't managed to score a couple of times, maybe it wouldn't suck as much, but they'd put in a hell of an effort, and if he could just have made one or two more saves...

"You do that with a lot of things, though." Hank says offhandedly, and Cam frowns.

"What do you mean?"

"Beat yourself up over things you think should have gone differently."

Cam's not sure where this is going now.

"I guess?"

"Are you and Chris alright?" Hank asks, and Cam sits up on his bed straight, nearly dropping his phone on the floor.

"Woah. Woah, woah, woah, how do you know about that? Did he say something?"

Lundqvist turns a page of his magazine, and gives Cam a sympathetic look over the top of it.

"Cameron," he says, in an annoyingly fatherly way, "If you're trying to hide something, you better not go around shouting about it like that."

"I'm not trying to hide anything," Cam lies, before realizing that he's really already said way too much to make that claim even halfway believable. Hank sighs and lets his magazine lie flat on the blankets in front of him.

"I overheard a conversation I wasn't meant to," he confesses, and Cam, mortified, wonders which conversation that could have been. The one he and Kreider had after practice? The one _before_ practice? How much detail is Hank talking about here?

"Between me and Kreider?" he asks. Hank shakes his head.

"No. And I did say I wouldn't say anything, but it occurs to me that it isn't quite fair for Chris to have someone to talk to if you don't."

"Is he...I mean, did he say something about...us, I mean me?"

"He mentioned a matter between the two of you, yes."

Cam feels the blood leaving his face. A matter. Well, that's pretty obvious, isn't it, there haven't been a lot of matters worth talking about lately other than the one.

"At the party?" he guesses. "What did he say?"

"Like I said, he wasn't talking to me. I didn't hear the entire conversation, just enough of it to know that something's different between the two of you."

"It's not!" Cam insists desperately. It can't be. "We talked about it, worked it out."

"But something happened, yes?"

"Can you just tell me what he said?"

Hank nods.

"I got the idea of a kiss," he says. Cam swallows hard.

"Yeah," he admits quietly. "Yeah, there was that."

"The impression I got from the conversation I should not have heard," Hank picks his magazine back up, "was that Chris is struggling with something he isn't sure he has the time or mental capacity to cope with at present."

Ugh. Everything Hank says is always so damned _perfect_. Styled. Cam groans.

"Who was he talking to?" he asks, dreading the answer. There are several guys on the team he doesn't really want to think about discussing this with.

"Ryan," Hank says, and Cam could swear he did that on purpose, trying to keep Cam guessing.

"Cally or McD?" he asks, trying to keep his voice even and his embarrassment and curiosity to a minimum.

"Cally," Hank answers. Cam closes his eyes. Well, that's just perfect. He's been trying so hard to prove that they made the right decision calling him up to play with the Rangers, and now after tonight, Cally probably thinks he's acting like a stupid, hormonal teenager, running around with crushes on his teammates, drunkenly making out with people and letting it go to his head and affect his game when it doesn't work out.

"Shit," Cam swears. "I gotta talk to him. I can't...I don't want him to think that I'm..."

"No one's going to think any less of you, Cam," Hank assures him.

"Yeah, because they're not gonna find out. Look, me and Kreider talked it out, it's not something anybody needs to worry about. We're not hooking up or anything. He didn't even want to...I mean, he didn't even stick around afterwards."

Hank glances over at him.

"Afterwards?"

"After I...afterIkissedhim." That last bit comes out as a quiet mutter. "He just ran off to the party, I guess. It's- it was totally one-sided, and now it's done, and it's nothing. It never was anything to begin with."

"If you say so." Hank shrugs.

"I do say so." Cam insists stubbornly. "I already explained all of this to him. I was just curious and I acted on it and it was dumb and I apologized and now it's over."

"I'm not so sure."

"Why!?" Cam's getting frustrated. Hank sets his magazine down again.

"Have you seen the way he looks at you?" he questions, and Cam finds that all the protests he was about to offer, all the bits of his argument, suddenly run dry in his throat. He swallows, trying to dismiss the words Lundqvist has just said.

"Don't say that, Hank. Please don't say that. What do you mean, how does he look at me?"

Hank shakes his head.

"That one you'll have to decipher for yourself. But it's not the way he looks at anyone else."

"Noooo-uughhhh." Cam moans, falling back onto the pillow. Why did Hank have to say that? He was going to be just fine, he was going to get over the whole thing, because he had no hope. Hopeless relationships, they die easily. When there's no chance of something ever happening, it's easy to let it go. Hope is the most terrible thing you can give a person who's trying to forget another person.

But right then, regardless of how Kreider might look at him or might not look at him, Cam knows there's no way he's the one who's going to act on it anymore. He tried it. He failed. He's done.

"He can look at me all he wants, but I'm out," he swears. "I put myself out there, and he ran off. Ball's in his court now. And honestly, Hank, I don't know what you're seeing, but I'm pretty sure he's not doing anything with it."

"With what?"

"With the hypothetical ball in his court. I'm pretty sure all Chris is interested in doing with it is deflating it, shoving it in a drawer somewhere, and letting it gather dust in the dark."

"That's a really strange analogy," Hank remarks, but he doesn't say anything else, and goes back to reading his magazine. This time, Cam gets the feeling that he's really done with the conversation, and he turns off the lights on his own side of the room and tries to sleep.

But when he does, he dreams.


	7. I Called Off My Plans, I Counted On You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here at last, we come to it.
> 
> Title from Evening Kitchen by Band of Horses. Go ahead and listen to it while you read, if you really want to make it emotional :P

Hank gets the start in Tampa, and Kreider is glad. Having a goalie who doesn’t confuse him in the net is basically the best thing that could possibly happen for his game right now. It isn’t that he really resents Cam for what happened, it’s just that…since they supposedly patched everything up, he’s having a hard time suppressing what he’s really trying very hard to believe isn’t a hollow feeling of disappointment. He and Cam finished the matter, they had a good discussion and they’re friends. It’s done. So why can’t he stop thinking about it?

The game goes well; despite the distractions of late, Kreider plays well, and manages to score. It's a beautiful goal, too, just a clean little backhanded shot that slides right in, and celebration erupts. In the middle of it, Chris looks up, across the ice, an arm still wrapped around Zuccarello, who fed him the pass, and catches Cam’s eyes from the bench. There’s nothing there that’s anything but appropriate, just pride and a little nod that makes Chris swallow hard, because suddenly there’s a tightness in his throat and he dissolves the celebration quickly, moving back into formation to reset for another play. 

After the game, he heads back to the hotel, and avoids speaking to anyone more than he has to. He has a lot on his mind, and there’s another game, an early one, coming up the night after next, and on top of that there’s New Year’s Eve to consider, and despite all of his attempts to think about something else, he keeps hearing Cally’s words over and over again in his head.

_Because he kissed you, or because you liked it?_

He’s supposed to be rooming with Pouliot, but after a quick conversation, he talks Girardi into switching places with him for the night, because he really has no one he can talk to about this besides Cally. He doesn’t want to draw anyone else into it, especially since it’s supposedly a matter that’s already done with. He supposes that Hank knows as well, but Hank’s rooming with Cam, and hell if he’s going over _there_. So he and Girardi swap rooms, and he’s just throwing his stuff down on the bed when Cally comes in.

Callahan backs into the door, tugging his bags behind him, and sees Kreider over his shoulder as he pushes his way in.

“You’re not G,” he says, but he’s smiling, so Chris knows he doesn’t really object to the change. “What’s up?”

Chris taps his fingers on the door frame between the main room and the bathroom. 

“Cally,” he says, rubbing at his face with his other hand, “I think I’m in trouble.”

“Why, you kill somebody? Rob a bank?”

Chris smiles slightly. 

“No, it’s…the thing we talked about the other day.”

“The thing with Cam?” Cally unzips his bag and starts pulling things out. 

“Yeah, that thing.”

“I told you to talk to him about it.”

“I did, and I mean, we’re good. He apologized, you know, we cleared it up.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Chris takes a deep breath.

“I can’t quit thinking about it. I just keep…going over it in my head, over and over again, I think I’m…I don’t know, it fucked me up pretty good.”

Cally pauses in his unpacking and crosses his arms over his chest.  


“What are you gonna do about it?”

“I don’t know what to do about it,” Kreider’s voice carries a touch of desperation. “Cally, what do I do?”

“Chris,” Cally says, seriously, “Look, I can’t tell you how to deal with this. I might be your captain but I’m not a shrink and I’m sure as hell not your personal therapist. I mean, don’t take that the wrong way, I’ll always be here if you need to talk about stuff, but this is between you and Cam, and you guys are really gonna have to figure it out before it wrecks your season. I don’t care what you have to do. If you like him, take him out, take him home, take him to bed, I don’t care. What you guys do is your business. Just don’t bring this into the game, alright?”

Chris lets out his breath in a long sigh. He knows Cally’s right. He wasn’t expecting a miraculous answer that would give him the solution to the situation, wasn’t hoping for a textbook on _How To Deal With That Teammate You Can’t Stop Obsessing Over After He Kissed You That Once_. Honestly, he knows that if he can just stop thinking about it, if he can just distract himself, he’ll get around this.

He sleeps restlessly, and wakes up in the middle of the night, hair damp with sweat, Cam’s name on his lips, and he’s completely hard. This is the third time this has happened lately, and it doesn’t go away until he goes into the bathroom and takes care of it himself, and as he leans against the wall in the shower, emptying his frustration down the drain, hand still wrapped around himself, he wonders, if Cam was the one who was so damned curious, why Chris is the one jerking off in the shower thinking about it.

Distracting himself proves to be a harder task than he had imagined, but the conversation with Cally gives him the resolve to keep it off the ice. Hank is in net again against the Panthers on Tuesday, and while it’s a hard game, they pull it off in a shootout that Kreider gets to watch from the bench. 

Afterwards, even though Kreider personally feels like going home and crawling into bed, the night is still young and they’re invited out to a party at a hotel, thrown by somebody Brad knows who lives in Miami. The guys scatter to various places; it isn’t like they all descend on one party in a mass herd of hockey players, but several of them, including Chris, decide to go.

Despite the fact that it’s New Year’s Eve, Chris has no real desire to get drunk. It’s what everyone else is doing, and it’s definitely what’s expected, but as he stands in the corner holding his first bottle of Heineken, he looks around and realizes that he’s probably one of the more sober people in the room. He tracks down the teammates he knows came along to this particular party. Miller is carrying around a whole bowl of cocktail peanuts, offering them to people. Hagelin and Zuccarello are taking selfies. He looks for Cally, and suddenly finds an arm draped around his shoulders. For a moment, he thinks it’s Cam, and for that split second, he feels like he can’t breathe. But then he realizes it’s Cally. 

“Chris,” Cally says, in such a deliberately precise way that Chris can tell he’s had a few more than he has, “Look. Look at him.” He points across the room, and Chris follows his pointing finger to find Cam in an opposite corner, doing what can only be described as sulking. Cally laughs. “Go talk to him. It’s New Year’s Eve. You guys are being dumbasses. Stop pretending to hate each other over some stupid kiss. People kiss each other. Sometimes it's an accident. Don't let it be the end of the world.”

“We don’t hate each-“ Chris protests, but Cally’s already gone, and he sighs. Well, if he’s sober and Cam’s sober, there’s not much that can go wrong, right? Maybe they’ll actually work something out. Something better than the temporary solution they came up with last time, a handshake and a nod that left Chris still wondering. He crosses the room and comes to stand beside Cam, but just as he gets there, Cam is scowling at him and turning away, pushing out of the door of the main room and down a back stairway in the hotel. Exasperated, Chris hurries after him, leaving his beer on a table near the edge of the room.

“Dude. Cam, come back. Look, they’re gonna do the countdown in like twenty minutes.”

Cam waves a hand over his shoulder in dismissal, continuing into some kind of basement that Chris really doesn’t think they’re supposed to be in.

“Would you just _stop?”_ Chris demands, raising his voice, and Cam finally stops, turning around, anger apparent in his eyes.

“Go back to the party,” he says, darting a hand through his hair impatiently.

As far as Chris is concerned, Cam doesn’t really have the right to be angry over this. He’s the one who started the whole thing, he’s the one who’s thrown Chris’s head into such a state of utter confusion. He doesn’t have the right to stand around all broody and watching Chris when he thinks he isn’t looking. 

It isn’t helping Chris’s state of mind, either. 

“Not unless you come too,” he refuses.

Cam shakes his head, looking angrier than Chris has seen him in a while. Even angrier than after that stupid goal that shouldn’t have been a goal against the Leafs. 

“What’s your problem?” Kreider demands. “I thought we were good, and now you’re just like…RAGE.”

“How are we supposed to be cool if you go around telling everybody on the team what happened?!”

“What are you even talking about? I didn’t tell everybody anything. I didn’t even-“

“You told Cally, that’s bad enough. I got enough on my plate right now without having to worry about whether Cally thinks I’m in love with you.”

“Maybe you should’ve thought about that before you fucking _kissed_ me!”

Cam looks as if he might be about to punch a wall. 

“It was a mistake! A really stupid, fucked up mistake that I made. I got it out of my system and it’s done, and I’d take it back if I could but I can’t, so I’d really like to just move on from it and get on with my career.”

“You don’t get to do that!” Kreider fairly well yells. “You don’t get to fuckin’ kiss somebody and then pretend like nothing happened, like you never did anything at all!”

Cam bites his lower lip, and looks defeated, letting his arms fall at his sides, and it’s like all the heat goes out of him, all the fire dies down.

“I know,” he says, barely audible. “I know. I just hoped that maybe if I…you know, we could just forget it happened, like we said. I can stay away or whatever, I can...”

"You can't stay away from me, we work together." Chris points out. Cam swallows hard.

"Then I'll ask for a trade," he offers, sounding broken. "You're right. This is on me. Whatever you need." The words are painful for him, Kreider can tell, and he has to imagine that it's not just some one-time curiosity that would drive a guy to offer something like that, offer to leave the town he loves, the team he loves, just to make Chris feel better. How can he stand there and say it was just an impulse with no further complications and then offer to do something like that? Kreider feels desperation rising in his heart, followed by what he can only honestly describe as affection. Cam would do that, for him, he believes him. If Chris tells him right then that what he needs is for Cam to clear out to another city, he knows Cam would do it. But that's not what Kreider needs. 

“I need you to do it again,” he blurts, and Cam’s head snaps up, his eyes wide, lips slightly apart as he sucks in a breath of air.

“What? Why? Isn’t this bad enough?” He gestures between them.

“Because, I…look, you did it, you got it out of your system, that’s what you said, yeah?”

Cam nods slowly.

“Well, you didn’t exactly give me that chance.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you…you spent all that time, or whatever, thinking about it, building it up to the point that somewhere inside that head of yours, you couldn’t go another second without finding out what it was like to kiss me, right?”

Cam nods silently.

“And then you did it, and fuck, Cam, that’s all I can think about. That might have been the end of it for you but it was just the fuckin’ start for me. I can’t get it out of my head. I need…You got your closure, I need mine.”

Cam thinks about that for a moment or two, then ducks his head in a nod.

“You going to run away again?”

Chris feels his heart jump into his throat. To be honest, he does feel like running away. He knows it wouldn’t help, though; he’s been avoiding Cam anyway, and that hasn’t helped at all. Hasn’t chased off the thoughts of what might have happened if he’d stayed, if he hadn’t run away that evening. And maybe Cam kissing him again isn’t going to fix it, either, but he’s at the end of his wits and willpower trying to figure out what to do with the situation and it’s just getting more and more unbearable as the days go by.

He shakes his head.

“No.”

There’s a moment of awkward silence between them, and Cam looks uncertain.

“I mean, what, do you want to schedule it, or just…”

Kreider groans.

“Just fucking…”

Cam doesn’t need to be asked twice, he puts out his hands, one to each of Kreider’s shoulders, wrapping strong fingers around the curves of muscle there, and pushes, pressing Kreider up against the cold concrete surface of the wall behind him in a show of force that sends a surge of desire straight down Kreider’s spine. The last thing he thinks as Cam leans in to close the distance between them is that he’s been horribly mistaken, that this isn’t going to help anything in the slightest, that Cam’s going to pull him in much deeper than he can handle, and that he can’t even complain because he’s just come out and asked for it.

His eyelids flutter at the first warm breath he feels on his skin, and _fuck_ his legs feel like they’re about to go to liquid underneath him. And then Cam is kissing him, and it’s everything he was afraid it would be and he doesn’t want it to end. His left arm comes up between them unbidden, fingers grasping at the crisp cotton of Cam’s shirt, finding their way up to his shoulder, and his right arm snakes around behind, his hand tugging up on the stray fold of tucked-in fabric, sliding his fingers up beneath the hem of the shirt, palming the ripples of muscles he finds straining in Cam’s lower back.

Cam’s tongue is between his lips then, and he parts them willingly as he surrenders himself to the kiss completely, back arching, trying to press himself closer, against the solid comfort of Cam’s body as his head turns slightly to deepen the kiss. Cam’s lips are strong - like the rest of him, Chris imagines, but his tongue is soft against his, gentle but demanding. Kreider can honestly say that he has never been kissed this way, never in his life has he been so utterly defeated by a single kiss as he is when Cam finally pulls away. Kreider’s chest is heaving with the effort of recovering his spent breath, and he can’t look away from Cam’s lips, shining and swollen…or maybe Cam’s lips have just always been that full, and he’s never noticed. Fuck, he’s in deep, and this is just making it worse, but all he wants is more.

He doesn’t let go, his right arm still wrapped around the small of Cam’s back, but he lets his head fall back against the wall with a quiet _thunk_ , finally pulling his gaze free of Cam’s face, staring upward at the ceiling as if he might find an answer there. He doesn’t know what to say…whether he should just initiate another kiss, or try to say something, something about how it was good and they should try it again, or…if, after all this, after pushing Cam away for the last few days, he even has the right to ask for more.

“Satisfied?” Cam asks, quietly. _Fuck_ , _no_ , Kreider thinks, but he can’t say so, can’t tell Cam exactly how much he wants him, wants to…

The thought of the things he wants to do, the things that spring to mind in that second, make him ashamed to be alive. He wants to go back to kissing like it’s the only thing keeping him breathing. Wants to reach between Cam’s legs and find out whether Cam is as turned on as he is. But a kiss is one thing…groping is quite another, that’s another base entirely, and Kreider is perched precariously right on first, teetering dangerously towards the edge where he might try to steal second.

He rocks his hips forward slightly, wondering if a gentle hint might be received or even noticed. His answer is a surprised hitch in Cam’s breath, followed by a sharp “Don’t.” He stops immediately, and drops his hand from Cam’s back. 

“Sorry,” he murmurs. “I didn’t mean to…”

“Kreids…” Cam breathes, and Kreider can see the dilemma in his eyes. Cam wants this as much as he does, he realizes, but they’re both terrified to push things across that line. “Swear you’re not running away this time.”

“I already said I-“

“I need to hear it again, because I really need to know that I’m not alone in this. Tell me you’re not scared shitless. Tell me you’re not going to run away.”

“One of those is true.”

Cam swallows hard, and his grip on Kreider’s shoulders tightens slightly.

“Touch me,” he says. Kreider feels himself throb, closes his eyes. He lifts his left hand from his side again, traces his fingers up Cam’s side. Cam swallows again, and blinks rapidly. “No. Chris. Touch me.”

“I am touch- oh.”

_Oh._

Kreider’s hand moves back around to Cam’s front, trying to find a good angle because they’re basically the same height and he’s not used to finding a dick that’s facing _towards_ him instead of pointing away, not used to the angle of approach necessary to try anything with it. He makes circles with his fingers over Cam’s hip, one finger teasing the line of skin above the waistband of Cam’s pants, his other hand fumbling with the button and zipper before managing to get them unfastened, then sweeps his palm downwards, over the hard length of Cam’s cock through the cloth.

Cam’s reaction is immediate and electrifying. He sucks in a breath and somehow manages to groan at the same time, and Kreider, encouraged, repeats the action. This time, he is rewarded by a thrust of Cam’s hips towards him and it’s his turn to let out a quiet moan at the contact. And suddenly, he is taken by an inexplicable urge, a need to follow through with this, to keep touching until Cam can’t hold back anymore. Emboldened by the thought of Cam coming in his hand, he lifts it up, spits into his own palm, then tucks it into the waistband of Cam’s boxers, wrapping his fist around his cock, working his hand up and down once or twice to get the feel for it.

It’s the first dick other than his own Chris has touched in his entire twenty-two years, but he _does_ have one, and he has a pretty good idea what to do with one. From the sounds Cam is making, it seems like he agrees. Chris works his hand over the head of Cam’s cock, brushing a thumb over the tip, pressing into the underside gently. Cam falls forward, one hand coming up off of Chris’s shoulder to catch his weight against the wall, and he buries his face in Kreider’s neck, whispering obscenities that Kreider can hardly understand because they’re muttered against his own skin, sending the crawl of goosebumps smattering across his neck and jaw. 

“It’s good,” Cam says, and those words Kreider _does_ understand. It spurs him on, makes him brave, brave enough to wiggle the fingers of his other hand under the waist of Cam’s boxers and push them down to his thighs, although it takes a little maneuvering to do so. 

“You’re the only thing I’ve been able to think about for the last week,” he says, tracing the sharp line of Cam’s hip down to his thigh, his other hand still moving up and down the length of Cam’s erection. Cam turns his face towards him, pressing a kiss to the skin he finds, his lips and tongue tasting the skin along the long arch of Kreider’s neck, up to the base of his jaw, where he sucks slightly before burying his face in Chris’s shoulder again. It’s all Kreider can do to stay focused, to keep from letting himself fall into Cam’s arms and begging him to take him to bed. 

He wonders how long Cam's going to last; he's rock hard and just short of coming in his own pants and Cam hasn't even really touched him yet, so he can only imagine that it's that much more intense for Cam. He drags a thumb over the tip of Cam's cock, slicking the drop of precome over the head, and Cam moans out loud. Vaguely, Chris wonders what it would taste like, a thought that makes him blush violently despite their current set of circumstances. 

"Chris," Cam breathes, and Kreider has to press his palm hard against his erection to keep from coming because there's something desperate and sweet about the way Cam says his name. "I'm close," Cam hisses, the whisper a breath of air over the skin of Chris's neck. 

"Good," Kreider says firmly, quickening his movements, the slick of his hand moving up and down on Cam's cock the only sound in the empty room aside from the harsh, uneven draw of their mismatched breathing. There’s the distant pulse of the music upstairs, but the room has no real ambient noise of its own other than what they’re creating. ”That’s what I want, Cam, I want you to come hard, all over my skin, this is what you wanted, right?" He has no idea where he's getting these things. He's never talked dirty to a guy before, and the things that come out of his mouth are much more demanding than anything he's ever said to a woman. "Come for me, babe." If Cam takes notice of or objection to Chris calling him _babe_ , he doesn't show it. He lets out a low, moan, his jaw falling open, forehead against the wall behind Chris, and he gives one last desperate thrust and then he's coming all over Chris's hand, hot and wet and Chris can't even look down because Cam's draped over him, hands still clinging to Chris's shoulders, obscuring his view of anything except for the back of Cam's neck and his shoulders. Chris doesn't stop until Cam shudders at the intensity of the touch and arches his back to move out of his grasp, staggering back a step to enough distance that they can meet each other's eyes.

Cam's pupils are dilated to the point that Chris swears they're completely dark as he pulls up his boxers and pants, zipping them slightly, and he's still breathing heavy, and Chris bites his lip hard to keep from acting on every impulse he has then. He's still painfully hard, and seeing Cam standing there panting and gazing at him in post-orgasmic bliss does absolutely nothing to help the situation. He lets out a small noise of desire, a hum that's almost a whine, looking down at his hand, lifting it up, tasting Cam, salty and bitter, still on his skin. It gets exactly the reaction he was hoping for; Cam's eyes widen and he clenches his jaw.

"Can I, uh…"

Chris assumes he's talking about returning the favor, and he nods quickly because he can't think of anything he's ever wanted more than he wants Cam's hands on him right then. He leans down, wipes his hand quickly on Cam's boxers, ignoring the face Cam makes at him as he does.

"Yeah. Yeah, man, please, I'm dying here. Do something."

Cam takes a step closer, but instead of moving to grab any part of him, he drops to his knees on the floor in front of Kreider. That's all it takes to make Kreider feel like his own legs are about to go out, but he wills himself to keep standing, even while Cam reaches up with shaking hands to unfasten his belt, the buckle clanking loudly in the hush of the room as he pulls Chris’s pants and boxers down to his ankles. He stares for a moment, taking a few deep breaths, and Chris doesn't blame him. He's not sure how he would go about giving a blow job either, given that he has zero experience in the matter. He lets a hand fall to the top of Cam's head, lacing his fingers through Cam's hair, his heart pounding in his chest, blood throbbing in his ears, in his face, everywhere, but mostly all of it's gone directly to his cock as Cam leans in and wraps his lips around the head. 

"Fuck," Chris manages in a strangled whisper, and it's all he can do to keep from coming right then, because after a week of constantly thinking about what it would be like to touch the man in front of him, after several consecutive nights of waking up hard and sweating in complete denial over what caused it, this is everything. Cam's tongue swirls around him and Chris bites down on his lip hard, trying with all his strength to resist fucking Cam's mouth. "Holy shit, Cam, where did you..." Cam takes him deeper, his mouth hot and wet, and Chris rocks his hips gently. Cam hums around him, and Chris isn't sure whether it's a noise of protest or approval but it feels fucking amazing, the way that little sound vibrates. Then Cam gets an easy rhythm going, lips tight around Chris's length, his tongue flat along the underside, teasing, stroking...For a first blow job, Chris thinks distantly, it's not sloppy, it's careful, like he's trying to give Chris as much as he can, like he's trying to make up for everything he's put them through in the last few days. He lifts his other hand up, fingers wrapping around Chris's balls, squeezing gently, just hard enough to be good. Chris can feel the tightness in his lower half, hot and building until he can't pull himself back from the edge. 

He tightens his grip on the strands of hair between his fingers, his other hand coming up to cradle the other half of Cam's head, and he taps twice with his fingers, trying to warn Cam, but he just keeps going, keeps taking him deeper until Chris sees stars and comes hard into Cam's mouth. 

Cam tries to swallow, Chris can tell, but he makes the rookie mistake of trying to swallow several times as it comes, and he chokes, rocking back onto his heels and wiping a hand over his mouth, red-eyed and gasping for breath. Chris slides down the wall, his legs finally giving out on him, and for a moment, they sit in silence, Chris sitting there half naked on top of his pants, Cam looking like he can't quite believe what he just did. 

Chris’s watch beeps once, signaling the change of the hour, and he looks down at it. It’s 2014. 

“Hey,” he says, nudging at Cam’s foot with his own. “Happy new year.”

He looks around, taking in their surroundings, and it’s not until then, when the desire has subsided, that things begin to sink in. Somewhere above them, people are kissing, drinking, toasting the promise of the year to come...and he and Cam Talbot are sitting on the floor in a hotel basement, wrecked with sex and the sudden reality of what they've done.

“What the fuck are we gonna do about this?” Cam asks, and Kreider closes his eyes, because he doesn’t have an answer.


	8. If I'm Not the Only One

Cam struggles to his feet a few minutes later, looking down at his boxers distastefully. 

“Please,” Chris teases, and Cam can tell he’s trying to force lightness on the situation. “Don’t try to act like this is the first time you’ve had your own jizz on your underwear.”

Cam smiles in spite of himself.

“No, I guess not,” he laughs. He’s quiet, because Chris still hasn’t answered his question, the question of what they’re going to do now that they’ve crossed lines they were both very reluctant to cross. He doesn’t know how to answer the question himself, though, so he can’t exactly blame Kreider for the same thing.

He strips out of his boxers, and Chris, in a gesture completely devoid of logic, looks away. Like he hasn’t seen it all, hasn’t had his _hands_ on it all just moments earlier.

“I’m just gonna leave these here,” Cam says, stuffing the boxers behind a stack of folding chairs. Now that they’re not all wound up with sexual tension, he starts to realize that the space they’re in is some kind of storage room. The hotel probably just keeps stuff down here for conferences and stuff, he figures. 

Chris chuckles - probably because despite the situation, there’s really nothing not funny about Cam, naked from the waist down, hiding his dirty underwear behind chairs in a fancy hotel. Cam shoots a disparaging glance in his direction, then pulls his pants back on and carefully zips them up. 

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Chris says, finally, as he buckles his belt. He clears his throat, crosses his arms, uncrosses them. “I mean, I guess we should just…you know…”

Cam doesn’t know, and he has no idea what Chris is thinking. Just forget about it? Just go with it? Just go back to the party and worry about it later?

“Just what?” he asks, almost afraid to hear the answer.

“I mean,” Chris repeats, but he doesn’t go on to say what he means. “Shit.” He turns around and faces the wall, palms pressed flat against the concrete, forehead resting on the surface of it. Cam steps closer cautiously, and puts a hand on his shoulder. It’s really strange; if Chris had been a girl, he would feel like they ought to be cuddling or something right now. Maybe spooning. But then, Cam’s never fooled around with a girl in the basement of a hotel, and Chris isn’t a girl. 

Kreider flinches at the touch, but Cam doesn’t withdraw his hand. Instead, he leans close, bowing his head, leaning his forehead into the curve of Kreider’s neck. He’s not sure if the gesture will be welcomed, but it’s what _he_ needs right then. Talking about feelings, talking about where a relationship is going to go, those aren’t strong points, Cam suspects, for either of them. But wherever they take this, he needs to know that he’s not alone, and needs Chris to understand that he isn’t either.

“We can’t…I mean, really, we can’t do this.”

“I think we just did,” Chris says softly.

“No, I mean, we can’t…” Cam sounds awkward, and Chris turns around, Cam lifting his head and dropping his hand to his side as the shoulder he was holding spins away from him. “It’s not like we can go out or something, right?”

“Cally said I could take you out,” Chris teases, and Cam cracks a smile.

“That’s not what I mean. I know we _can_ , I just…it would complicate things, right? We play together. What if it…what if it didn’t work out, then what? The guys are counting on us, we can’t just jump into something that could fuck up their season as well as our own.”

Cam isn’t so far gone in this that he’s willing to assure Chris that of course they should date, they should be together forever and nothing will go wrong. He doesn’t know that. It’s been enough of a struggle to get to the point where they aren’t afraid to touch each other, and they’ve only _just_ gotten there. 

“It was good, though,” Cam says. Kreider bites his lip and ducks his head. Cam can’t tell if he’s nodding or if he’s just avoiding Cam’s eyes.

“Yeah,” Chris breathes. That was a nod, then. “Yeah, you uh, you got a talented mouth.”

A laugh escapes Cam’s chest almost like a cough.

“I do what I can.”

“So what…what do we do?” Chris asks, finally. Cam rests his forehead against Kreider’s, lets his hand come up and rest against the wall under Kreider’s arm.

“Do we do anything at all?” he asks, almost fearfully. 

“I just-“ Chris lets out his breath, and Cam feels it on his lips, warm, with the faint smell of a beer he’s pretty sure Chris never finished. “I still want you. It’s not like that fixed anything. I feel better right now, but I know that in a day or so, I’m just going to-“

“Want it all over again.” Cam finishes. 

“Yeah.”

“And I mean, I can’t see us just…leaving this here. We tried the pretending-it-never-happened, and that was when it was just a kiss.”

Cam leans back and shakes his head.

“No. I can’t see that either. I don’t want-“ He hesitates, then looks up, his eyes locking onto Kreider’s. “I don’t want this to be the last time I kiss you.”

Kreider smiles, that wide, thin-lipped grin that brings a little light to his whole face, but it’s only for a moment.

“It won’t be,” he says. “I know that. I know myself too well.”

“So we take it one day at a time,” Cam suggests. “There’s no reason we have to make up the whole future right now in a conversation in a hotel basement. We take it a day at a time, we…” 

He stops because Kreider leans forward and covers his mouth with his own. It’s a short, sweet kiss that’s nothing like the desperate, open-mouthed passionate kissing they did a while earlier, but it takes Cam’s breath away all over again because it's Kreider initiating it.

“The important thing is…at least if we’re fucked up, we’re on the same page now. We’ll figure it out.” Kreider says, and Cam knows that’s as far as they’re getting tonight. He puts his shoes back on - it’s funny, he can’t even remember taking them off - and he heads back up the stairs behind Kreider, frowning slightly at the feeling of going commando in his already-heightened state of sensitivity. They don’t hold hands, there are no longing glances, and they step back into the large main room vaguely at the same time.

The party is still going strong, and it takes Cam a moment to take it all in. He finds a beer - after all, he’s already done way more tonight than alcohol has ever caused him to do, then he locates Cally. He walks up beside him casually, trying to gauge exactly how drunk he is.

“Happy new year, man!” he says, summoning up all of his enthusiasm and clinking his beer against Cally’s glass.

“Wooo!” is the answer he gets, and he figures that maybe now isn’t the best time to tell Cally that whatever he was worried about before, he doesn’t have to worry about Chris and Cam avoiding each other and being awkward anymore. On second thought, maybe he shouldn’t say anything about that anyway. He wants Cally to know, wants him to understand that Cam isn’t a hormonal wreck who goes around kissing his teammates at random, but he also really doesn’t want to have a conversation with his captain that starts off with _So Chris and I got each other off in the basement..._

“You missed the countdown,” Cally reprimands him, as his glance slides across the room to track Kreider’s progress to the bar. “Are you guys good?”

Cam nods quickly.

“Yeah, we worked things out,” he says. Cally slaps him on the back.

“Glad to hear it. He was pretty worked up over you.” Cally’s talking really, really loud, and Cam suddenly wants to wrap up the conversation so no one else overhears. Worked up over him, what does that even mean? Confused, or...

“I’m gonna go see what kind of food there is,” he says, raising his bottle for another toast. Cally smacks his glass against it a little too enthusiastically, but nothing breaks, and Cam starts off towards the buffet where Kreider, Hagelin and Zuccarello are monopolizing the mozzarella sticks happily.

“Hey Cam!” Cally calls after him, and Cam looks back, pausing a few feet away.

“Yeah?”

“Tell Chris his fly is open.”


	9. It's Temporary, This Place I'm In

There is nothing in the world more frustrating, Cam thinks, than watching a game from the bench like the one they play against Pittsburgh. It’s like having his hands tied, because he can see the anger, can feel the tension…he knows how tired and frustrated everyone is, firing shot after shot and getting nothing for it. Knows how hard Hank’s going to be on himself that night after it’s all over, what the media’s going to say, how they’ll all have to tune out the endless shouting for trades and buyouts. 

By the end of it, Cam’s just glad it’s over. He stands in the shower with the water turned up much too warm, like he can wash the memory of the game down the drain if he stands there long enough, despite the fact that he doesn’t have that much to wash off after he hasn’t even played. He gets dressed, heads back to the hotel, and makes it to the room in time to find Hank packing up his things.

“Where the hell are you going?” he wonders aloud, less demanding than he is just surprised. Hank is quiet, but answers after a moment.

“It isn’t you, Cam, I just need some time to think.”

“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Cam says, echoing the words Hank said to him just a week earlier. “It’ll only distract you from the next game.” 

Hank gives him a _look_ , but Cam just grins back at him.

“No, seriously, where are you going?”

“Taylor’s room. There’s a spare bed there.”

It takes Cam a second or two to remember that of course Pyatt’s room would still be empty. He’d assumed someone else would have been staying there, too, but maybe the numbers worked out differently this time with people coming and going from Hartford at the rate they are these days. 

“Besides,” Hank says, knowingly, “I have a feeling someone needs your company tonight a little more than I do.” 

That, on the other hand, takes Cam all of a millisecond to figure out. Surprisingly, he doesn’t find himself blushing in response to the comment, though, he just nods, and wonders exactly how obvious it is to the world that he and Kreider aren’t avoiding each other anymore. 

Not that they’ve been particularly cuddly, but after New Year’s, they’ve been almost back to themselves. If anyone’s noticed that Cam smiles a little wider in Chris’s direction, or that Chris is a little more protective of Cam when he’s in goal, they haven’t said anything, but he has to believe that it’s obvious they’ve gotten over some kind of tension between them.

“Hank,” Cam says, just before Lundqvist lets the door slide shut. Hank pokes his head back in.

“Mm?”

“Really, man, don’t let it get to you. We’re all…there’s a lot of shit happening right now, and it’s not your fault.”

Hank presses his lips together and nods silently before heading off into the night, and Cam goes about his business in his now-empty hotel room, trying to collect his thoughts. He picks up his phone, taps out a text message to Kreider.

_Want 2 come over?_

Then he deletes it, doesn’t send it, and tries again.

_Need some company?_

Jeez, that makes him sound like a cheap hooker trying to make a pass. He deletes that one, too. His third attempt isn’t an invitation, just a statement of fact, which he does end up sending.

_Hank staying in Pyatt’s room._

Then he sets his phone aside, changes into a long sleeved shirt because it’s fucking _freezing_ in Pittsburgh (probably warmer than it is back at home in New York, although that thought doesn’t do much to warm him up), and turns on the tv. There’s nothing good on this time of night, but he can’t stand the silence, and sleep isn’t happening. He doesn’t even have the advantage of having used all of his energy in the game, seeing as he spent the whole thing on the bench, and he’s a bundle of pent up frustration and nerves. 

A good half hour passes while he flips through channels mindlessly, tries to settle on something that isn’t too loud or too quiet to hold his interest. He finally settles on some documentary about some exotic place, probably the Amazon, someplace warm and not Pittsburgh, then tosses the remote down onto the bed and makes his way to the door. He checks the lock, slides the chain into the slot, and wonders whether he really has any reason to have expected that Chris would come running to him after a game like that. Maybe Chris is like Hank, and just wants to be alone after a defeat, or maybe he’s already asleep, exhausted from a game that was probably, for him, just as brutal physically as it was mentally. 

Cam leans against the door and tries to shut it all out. The look on Hank’s face after the fifth goal Pittsburgh scored on him. Derek…god, Dorsett finishing out that shift on a broken leg…and the feeling of complete, utter helplessness that comes with watching all of it from the sidelines. He takes a deep breath, reaches for the light switch, and that’s when there’s a knock on the door.

Cam hasn’t realized until that moment exactly how much he was hoping for a knock, and once he hears it, it’s not like he even really knows who’s on the other side. Except he does. He knows exactly who’s on the other side. He turns back around, slides the chain off of the door, and opens it.

Kreider is standing there, hands jammed deep into the pockets of his coat, his bag beside him, breathing puffs of steam out into the frigid night air. Cam steps aside, and Kreider moves into the room before Cam shuts the door behind him. For a moment, it’s clear that neither of them know exactly what to say, and it isn’t because of the awkward tension that was between them before, it’s because after a game like that, there isn’t a lot _to_ say.

Before this moment, Cam had an idea in his head that Kreider would show up, forlorn over the game, and Cam would take care of him. Take him to bed, or…give him an encore performance of what went down (literally and figuratively speaking) in the hotel basement on New Year’s Eve. But the second Chris is in the room, Cam knows he’s got other ideas, that Chris didn’t come here to be taken care of.

“You, uh…you wanna talk about the game?” Cam offers. Kreider shakes his head, rubbing his hands together to warm them up.

“Not what I had in mind,” he says, before giving Cam a look, a _stare_ , the kind that goes right into his heart and grabs hold of it and squeezes.

“What do you want, what do you need?” Cam asks, determined to do whatever it is, even if it means sitting up and talking about their feelings until dawn (although he genuinely hopes that’s not it).

“I need you,” Chris breathes, and then he’s shedding layers of clothing, first his coat, then the hoodie he’s wearing under that. He backs Cam up against the bed. Cam’s legs hit the mattress, and Chris keeps pushing, toppling him over onto the bedspread, crawling onto the bed after him. “I need you, I need all of you, I need you to get my mind off of…fuck, _everything._ ”

He straddles Cam while he pulls off his own shirt, and in spite of the fact that Cam feels like he ought to be helping or at least undressing himself, all he can bring himself to do is watch as Kreider tugs the t-shirt over his head, muscles straining beneath his skin as he flexes his arms upward. Cam reaches up, drags a hand over the contours of Kreider’s abdominals, fingers trailing over the soft, near-invisible hair there. Kreider shivers at the ghosting touch of Cam’s fingers, and falls forward, catching his weight with his hands on either side of Cam’s head. His hair is wild and Cam doubts he really did anything to it after he showered, he wouldn’t have needed to, after all, and his eyes are dark and full of all the emotions Cam’s been trying to get out of himself all night. Frustration. Anger. Pain. But there’s something else there, too, and that’s sheer, hot desire. Cam’s not sure Chris can see the same wanting in his eyes, but he’s sitting right on top of the proof, a fact Cam’s reminded of as Chris grinds into him, rolling his hips down into Cam’s. Cam lets out a quiet moan, and Chris leans down to capture the sound in a rough kiss, teeth and lips colliding, tongues warm against each other. His left hand comes up off of the bed, and he shifts his weight onto his right arm as he uses his left to pull Cam’s shirt upward.

“ _Cam_ ,” he says urgently, and Cam props himself up on his elbows, trying to help make it a little easier as Chris pulls his shirt up and over his head. Cam takes advantage of the position to lean forward, pressing heated, open-mouthed kisses to Kreider’s chest, and his tongue finds Kreider’s nipple. The reaction he gets - a quiet hiss of pleasure from Chris - reassures him, and he swirls his tongue around it, hard between his lips.

Kreider pushes him back down, and climbs off completely, eliciting a noise of complaint from Cam, (despite his knowing that it would have to happen sooner or later for any more clothes to come off). He stays there, watching as Kreider sheds his sweatpants. It’s hard for him to believe that this is the same Chris Kreider who ran away from a kiss  a week and a half earlier, because there’s no uncertainty about him now, he’s moving like he knows exactly what he wants. There’s no need to discuss it, no need to try to continue the conversation from the other night, because none of that matters. In that moment, all that matters is that Kreider is looking down at Cam like he needs him more than he needs air in his lungs. 

He sits up, reaching for the waistband of his own pants to pull them down, but Kreider presses him back down onto the bed, kissing him again, softer this time, his hands on Cam’s wrists, holding him down, and honestly, having Chris pin him to the bed is something Cam didn’t even know he wanted until right at that second but _god_ does he want it. He strains against the hold around his wrists, leaning up to try and reach Kreider’s lips, but Chris is _strong_ , and it’s harder than he expects because Chris isn’t giving in, he’s holding Cam down, leaning just close enough to steal kisses that are much too brief for Cam’s liking. 

“C’mon,” Cam pleads, breathlessly between kisses.

“Hm?” Kreider says, pulling back, letting Cam’s hands go and rocking back to rest his weight fully on his legs, rolling his hips into Cam’s again. 

“Come on, man. Don’t tease me.” 

Chris’s throat shifts as he swallows, and his teeth come down on his lip, pressing into the skin, and Cam just wants to  pull him down and keep him there. A moment of indecision flickers across his face, but it’s gone again just as quickly. 

“You’re not gonna break me, I can take it,” Cam promises. Chris leans down, and his lips find Cam’s forehead, warm against Cam’s skin. Cam laughs, because wasn’t it the thought of a stupid kiss on the forehead that started all of this?

Chris sits back again and frowns.

“What’s funny?” he asks, looking worried, like he’s done something wrong, and it strikes Cam that maybe Chris is just as insecure as he is about all of this. 

“Nothing, nothing,” Cam assures him. “You’re…It’s just, that was what I thought about, that was the first thought I had that led to…”

“What was?”

“You, you know. There.” He lifts a hand and taps his own forehead. 

“You wanted me to kiss your face?” It’s Chris’s turn to look amused now, and Cam makes a face because that sounds completely lame.

“No, I…you know, you did that…kissed my mask, after the game, after several games, and I wondered…”

Chris looks down at him, a mixture of emotions passing across his features.

“You’re a weirdo, Talbot,” he says matter-of-factly, but he says it in the same breath as he leans down to kiss Cam again, first on his forehead, then on his lips, a real kiss this time, and his other hand reaches down and pulls at Cam’s pants, dragging his palm over Cam’s erection through the cloth. Cam’s hips snap upwards into the touch, and he arches his back, making room for Chris to tug his pants down. Kreider takes his boxers along with the pants, tosses them over his shoulder onto the floor, and starts his way back up the length of Cam’s legs, his mouth hot and wet on the inside of Cam’s thigh. Cam lets out his breath in a huff, then sucks it back in as Chris’s lips wrap around the head of his cock. 

“Chris,” Cam says quietly, and Kreider lifts his head up, eyes questioning, lips wet and shining in the light. Cam hadn’t meant to get his attention, really, he just likes the sound of Kreider’s name, especially when Chris is doing stuff like _that_. 

“Cam, I didn’t come here to suck your dick.” Chris says, and Cam raises an eyebrow.

“Doesn’t mean you have to stop,” he points out. Kreider stands up again (infuriatingly) and slips out of his own boxers and socks, flexing his fingers at his sides, chest rising and falling unevenly with his breath. Cam sits up, watching him.

“What I mean is, I went to the store, I got some stuff.”

Cam holds his breath as he puts those pieces together, and when they click into place, he lets it all out slowly. 

“Oh,” he murmurs, as Chris grabs the bag out of his coat pocket on the floor and pulls out a bottle and a small package of condoms. He feels a lot of things right then - arousal, obviously, which he can’t even hide now, being completely naked, but also trepidation. They haven't talked about this, this hasn't even entered the discussion. Cam has ideas, he's not stupid, not unexposed to the ideas of the world, but he's not sure he's really ready for this. He wants it, though, despite the bundle of nerves that seems to have risen up in his throat. "Have you ever?" he asks, although he's pretty sure he knows the answer even before Chris shakes his head.

"Not really. With a guy, I mean."

Well, Cam thinks, that's something, anyway. He knows that logically he shouldn't, they shouldn't, that there's a strong chance he's going to get the start tomorrow night in Toronto, and that he probably shouldn't do anything that's going to jeopardize his ability to walk around comfortably. But he wants to, wants to give Chris exactly what he needs, so he  looks Kreider in the eyes and nods. 

Chris hands him the bottle of lube, and Cam looks at it for a few seconds, not really sure where to start, wondering if Chris wants him to just...do it himself while he stands there watching. Then Chris bites his lip and says “Don’t go easy on me," and throws himself down onto the bed next to Cam, who's still sitting up. 

"Wait," Cam says, hesitating, "You want me to..."

"Yeah, Cam," Chris says impatiently. "I want you to fuck me, so I can forget about that goddamned game."

Cam's breath catches in his throat as he looks down at Kreider, meets his pleading glance.

“Okay, yeah, I’ll just…” He shifts, moving between Kreider’s legs, finding his balance on his knees with Kreider spread around him. This isn’t how he imagined this. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that…when he imagined this, when he dreamed about it, in his mind, it was always the other way around, it was Chris bending _him_ over, opening him up, taking him hard and fast, but this, this is good too, except…Well, he realizes that he’s more nervous about hurting Chris than he was about Chris doing any particular damage to _him_. With shaking hands, he undoes the plastic seal from around the bottle of lube, and pours a small pool into the palm of his hand, testing the consistency, then wraps his hand around Chris’s cock, his hand sliding up and down easily with the lube. 

Chris seems to be enjoying it, but it’s obviously not what he really wants, because he lets out a sound Cam can only describe as a whimper, and thrusts upward into Cam’s hand.

“Fuck it, Cam, _please,_ ” he begs. Cam slides a finger into him carefully, and watches Chris’s face closely for any indication that it’s too much, that he’s hurting, but other than Chris obviously clenching his jaw, he just seems to be enjoying it.

“Good?” Cam asks. Kreider nods swiftly.

“Yeah. Keep going.” He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, and his eyelids flutter as Cam slides his finger out, then back in again. There’s something incredibly erotic about watching Chris, who is usually so together, so intensely focused, come apart underneath him. He adds more lube, then tries two fingers. Kreider winces then, and Cam freezes.

“No, no, no,” Kreider shakes his head. “Don’t stop, Cam, don’t you fucking stop.” Cam has doubts, then, Chris is _so_ tight around just two fingers, Cam has no idea how he’s going to handle his entire cock. But Chris is begging for it, he’s pleading, and Cam thinks that maybe he wants this, maybe he’s used to pain and that’s the only way he knows of to deal with shit like this. He spreads his fingers slightly, presses them inside up to his knuckles…pulls out, then presses back in, and Chris’s head rolls to one side and he moans. 

Cam is achingly hard at this point, but he takes his time, working his fingers in and out of Chris until he can fit a third. Chris puts the back of his hand over his own mouth and bites down, his breath coming hard and fast through his nose, and Cam hesitates again, but Chris rocks his hips upwards, trying to press Cam’s fingers deeper inside of him.

Cam has to add more lube then, before pressing his fingertips back inside, but Chris is shaking his head, and Cam stops, watching him.

“What? Are you alright? Should I slow down?”

“No,” Chris hisses. “No, you should not slow down. Fuck me.” Cam resumes moving his fingers, but Kreider reaches down and grabs his hand. “For real.” Kreider specifies, and Cam sits back onto his heels, swallowing hard.

“Are you sure?”

“God, Cam, stop treating me like I’m made of glass, I can handle a little pain, all right?” The words sting slightly, because Cam’s just trying to be careful, but after the way things have gone tonight, Cam can’t blame him for having a little pent-up anger and frustration. He nods, and reaches for the condoms, his fingers still shaking and slick with lube as he tears at the cardboard of the box, pulling out one and ripping open the packet. He rolls it onto himself, stroking his cock once or twice to stay hard, more out of habit than out of actual necessity. 

“Do you want to roll over?” he asks, and Kreider, after thinking about it quickly, nods, shifting over onto his hands and knees. It’s a different angle, but Cam imagines that it’ll work better, especially the first time. First time…like he’s already mentally intending that they’ll do this again, like he’s counting on it. He leans forward, guides the head of his cock towards Chris’s ass, then thinks twice and adds extra lube even though the condom already has some. “Okay…” he mutters, pressing forward, and his first thought is that there’s no way this is going to work, it’s too tight. 

“Go, go, go,” Chris says breathlessly, almost like he’s urging on a play, and Cam presses inside slowly.

“Oh, fuck,” he breathes, because it’s tight, and hot, and possibly the best thing he’s ever felt. 

“Ah,” Kreider gasps. “Jeez, Cam, you’re fucking huge, I’m…”

Cam’s never thought of himself as anything too far above average in the size department, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to hear otherwise from Kreider. He presses forward, determined to keep going until Chris tells him to stop this time because he’s not risking another frustrated outburst. If this is what Chris wants, Cam’s going to give it to him. He moves slowly but steadily, pressing his hips towards Kreider’s until he’s completely inside him, until he can feel Chris’s muscles spasming around his entire length.

“Tell me when I can move,” he says, leaning forwards over Kreider’s back, running his hand from Kreider’s hip up to his shoulder, fingers curving gently into the flexing muscles of Chris’s shoulder blade. Chris nods quickly, but it’s a moment or two before he responds.

“Now,” he whispers, and Cam pulls out slowly, then presses back in. Chris grunts, a sound that Cam doesn’t imagine he would find sexy coming from anyone else, but from Chris, it makes him want to let go of every shred of carefulness and caution he’s holding onto. He thrusts again, and this time, Chris rocks his body back against him.

“Harder,” he says, and Cam is more than happy to oblige. He finds a steady rhythm, which Chris matches with the panting breaths he lets out each time Cam moves inside him. Cam takes a chance, jerks his hips forward quickly.

The “Oh” sound that the motion forces out of Chris is almost one hundred percent surprised ecstasy, and Cam feels like maybe he’s figured it out, maybe he’s found the exact spot that he needs to touch to make the the pleasure Chris is getting out of this outweigh the discomfort. He tries to do the same thing again, and is rewarded by a louder version of the same sound from Kreider.

“There?” he asks, although he’s pretty sure he knows the answer as he quickens the pace a little. Kreider’s head falls forward, his forehead buried in the pillow between his arms, and he’s saying things into the sheets, most of which Cam can’t hear or understand.

“God, Cam, yeah…” he makes out. The rest is a jumble of sounds and almost-words that Cam can’t decipher, but it intensifies as he keeps moving. He can feel the familiar building of pressure in his center, heat that spreads outward, and he leans forward, biting down on Chris’s shoulder, his hand still resting on Chris’s hip, fingers wrapping around into the curve between his thigh and stomach. He’s about to warn Chris that he’s not going to last very long, but Chris gasps out a sound of his own, his hands grasping at the pillows in front of him, grabbing fistfuls of pillowcase and whatever he can reach.

“Can you just…don’t stop, just use your hand a little, I’m gonna come,” he says. It’s the most coherent sentence Cam’s heard out of him in the last few minutes, and he reaches down, wraps his fingers around Chris’s dick, and he’s hardly even started when Chris lets out one long breath, broken with harsh, stuttering noises of desire that shift into sheer pleasure, and comes onto Cam’s hand and his own chest, his body shuddering beneath Cam’s. That’s all it takes to send Cam over the edge as he feels Chris clench around him, and he finishes hard into the condom, riding out his orgasm with a few final thrusts. 

And then, for a few moments, they’re quiet. Cam pulls out, disposes of the condom, then turns the lights off and returns to the bed, where Kreider’s managed to clean himself up with the box of hotel-standard tissues on the nightstand beside the bed. Cam tugs the bedspread out from under them, crawls underneath it, and although he doesn’t say anything directly to Chris, Kreider joins him beneath the blankets anyway. They aren’t spooning, really, the only contact between them is the fingers Cam traces down Kreider’s spine as they finish catching their breath.

“Tomorrow will be better,” he says, even though he knows it’s not something he can really promise single-handedly. But right then, in the cooling heat of the moment, it is a promise he can’t help but make. “We’ll do better. I will. I promise.” Even if he has to score the goals himself, he thinks. He’s not letting Chris down. 

Not this time.

Not ever.

They sleep, and when Cam awakens in the morning, Chris’s forehead is pressed up tight against him, fitted perfectly in the valley of Cam's back between his shoulders.


	10. Coming Up Only to Hold You Under

Chris wakes up slowly, and the first thing he’s aware of is the warmth of skin against his face. It takes him a few seconds to remember where he is, to remember who it is he’s pressed up against, and when he does, it takes the entirety of his self-control to keep from flailing his way out of the bed. He’s sore in unmentionable places, and he closes his eyes, recalling the night before. He was in bad shape after the game, even after the team meeting, he remembers that, but the memory of leaving the arena, going to the drug store, that almost feels like he’s watching someone else’s memories.

The things he remembers from the night before, the things that really linger with him, are sensations. Cam, warm and alive underneath him, begging him to stop teasing. Cam’s hands on him, inside him, lips and tongues and…Chris shifts uncomfortably, and Cam’s head turns, his profile visible in the early morning light, and Chris draws his face back from against his back.

“What time is it?” Cam asks, his voice scratchy. Chris twists, looking over his own shoulder at the clock on the nightstand. 

“Five thirty,” he says. The sun’s not even up yet, but they both know they have to be up soon. Back to back games don’t offer a lot of down time, especially not for lying in bed naked discussing their feelings. Oh, shit, they _are_ still naked, aren’t they? Kreider sits up on his side of the bed, and Cam rolls over to sit up on his, and for a moment, they sit there, staring away from each other. Kreider reaches towards his pants with his foot where they’re still lying on the floor where he left them the night before, and manages to hook the waistband with his toe, drawing the sweatpants towards him until he can reach them leaning over. He grabs his boxers off the top of the little pile, pulls them on as he stands up, then puts his pants on too.

Cam stands up slowly, searching around for his own clothes, and grabs them from the floor on his way over to flip the light switch. The room floods with light, and Kreider blinks against it as he unzips his bag and pulls out a sweater, which he tugs over his head. There is a silence between them, and Kreider wonders if staying the night was really the best idea. They did things the night before that Kreider has a feeling neither of them have ever done before, and now neither of them can really seem to figure out how to start a conversation. Cam goes to the sink, brushes his teeth, and Kreider packs his things back into his bag, zipping it back up and putting it on the unused bed. 

“You want to get breakfast?” he asks, finally. Cam flashes a grin at him.

“Decide you want to take me out after all?”

Kreider looks at his feet and doesn’t answer, because he knows Cam probably wants him to say yes, but all he can think of is that he doesn’t want to make this more than it is, he doesn’t want to talk about commitment or anything. He’s had one night stands with girls before, of course, and this is different, this is Cam, he _likes_ Cam, at the very least as a teammate and a friend, and the sex was great, but that doesn’t mean he wants to get married or suddenly start telling everyone he has a boyfriend. Boyfriend. What a dumb word, anyway. They’re not boys, they’re men. Manfriend? That thought makes him laugh, and Cam turns around to glance at him.

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing,” Chris shakes his head, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “Hey, I’ll see you later, okay?”

Cam nods, and Chris heads for the door before he has to look at Cam’s face. He doesn’t know exactly what he’ll find there, but he’s not sure he could handle either affection or disappointment at the moment. 

He opens the door a crack and checks both directions before stepping out. When he left his room the night before, Pouliot hadn’t been there, but he certainly would have noticed by now that Chris hasn’t been there all night, and Kreider really doesn’t feel like answering any questions. He runs into Cally in the lobby, sipping at a coffee cup that he’s holding between his hands at one of the little tables. Chris grabs a muffin and a carton of orange juice from the breakfast bar and sits down across from Callahan, dropping his bag on the floor beside the table.

“Morning,” Cally says, grinning at him, and Chris isn’t quite sure what’s necessitated that kind of oversized smile.

“Morning it is,” he agrees, taking a bite of the muffin.

“Sleep alright?” Cally asks, sipping his coffee. Chris is a little unnerved by the fact that Callahan is just sort of…watching him, and starts to regret not finding his own table somewhere in the corner. If Cally was multitasking, reading a newspaper or something at the same time, that would be one thing, but he’s not.

“Yeah,” Kreider nods. “Pretty good. Once I got to sleep. Hard to let go of one like that, you know?”

Cally nods too.

“Tonight’ll be better,” he predicts, and it occurs to Chris that it’s the second time someone’s promised him that in the last twenty-four hours. 

“That’s what Cam said,” he says, and then immediately wishes he hadn't. He was just planning to have a normal, ordinary conversation with his captain, one that didn't involve Cam at all, and that had just sort of slipped out. "I mean, that's sort of what everybody's hoping."

Cally doesn't comment on Cam at all, just takes another sip of his coffee and stands up.

"I gotta get going, still have to grab my stuff from the room. See you on the plane?"

Chris polishes off the rest of his muffin.

"Yeah, yeah, on the plane," he agrees. Plane. Then Toronto. Then back home to New York, which is sounding better than ever.

 ---

Cam gets the start that night, just like Chris suspected. Kreider wonders if maybe it's the added motivation of the fact that he _promised_ him that they would play better (he doubts it), but they really do. It almost starts out an even game for a few moments, but then the Rangers practically explode into life. Cam is all but rock solid in the net, and Chris is almost sure he's going to make it a shutout when the Leafs manage to put their lone goal in late in the game. 

At that point, though, it doesn't even matter. Chris has lost count of the shots on goal, and by the end, seven of them have gone in (eight, really, but they're not even going to try to argue the interference call that takes that one back) including one of his own that he's particularly proud of. 

When time finally runs out, there's a very different energy in the air than there was in Pittsburgh. Chris skates towards the net, past Cally, who's just turned around and is making his way back across the ice. Cally's eyebrows lift up ever so slightly at him underneath his helmet, and Kreider tries to ignore it, finishing off the distance between himself and the goalie who's somehow managed to make his life so much more complicated so quickly. It's a weird moment. In light of what happened last night, in light of all that's transpired between him and Cam since the last time they won with Cam in the net, he's putting a lot more thought into this than he did before. But the gesture comes naturally to him; it'd be bad luck to not do it now, after everything, and he leans in and kisses Cam's mask, hoping he looks as casual as he tries to. Then, just in case, he adds on a couple good whacks to the side of his head. Cam ducks away from the pressure of his hand, and Chris can't quite see his expression all that well through the mask, but he thinks Cam is smiling. He doesn't get the chance to stick around and find out, though, because these lines aren't for discussions, and he peels off after Cally, making his way towards the locker room.

Vigneault doesn't keep them long - after a game like that, there's very little to say. They've played the way they're supposed to play, and the only point that really needs to be made is that they ought to be playing that way _every_ night. 

Afterwards, though, it’s pretty clear that all anyone really wants to do is get back home, enjoy the Sunday off in New York, and get some rest. Back-to-back games are always exhausting, and after an emotional whirlwind like these two games have been, Kreider can’t imagine anything he wants more than his own bed. No hockey, no sex, no confusing feelings or non-feelings. 

Ironically, when he wakes up in his bed in New York the next day, when all he wants to do is rest, his mind goes into overdrive. He can’t stop thinking about Friday night, in that hotel in Pittsburgh, and he realizes that he’s not going to be getting any more sleep. He kicks the blankets off impatiently and stands up, stretching his arms over his head. He doesn’t even have anything planned for the day, but maybe that’s for the best. The world is cold out the window, he can feel the chill off of the pane in front of him as he looks down on the cityscape below him, and he wonders idly what Cam’s doing. Probably waking up, or maybe he’s managed to sleep in unlike Kreider. Chris realizes where his train of thought has gone, and lets his forehead fall against the cold glass of the window, groaning out loud. 

The thing is, Chris knows himself. He knows that when he lets himself become attached to something, when he does things, he does them whole-heartedly and without reservation. All of his relationships have been quick, passionate, and have fallen to pieces because of it, although at twenty-two, it’s not like he has a huge backlog of failed love stories either way. But he is fully aware that if he lets himself carry on like this much longer, it’s not going to take much time before he can’t keep Talbot out of his head at all.

He goes for a run, not a long one because it's so damned cold, then comes home and showers, and by the time he gets out of the shower, he's desperate for something to occupy his mind. He picks up his phone, flips through the numbers, goes to the "girls" group. It's been a while since he's used that particular group, he just hasn't had time, but he's got a few names in there still. He picks the first one, and presses the call button.

"Hello?" A woman's voice answers, and Chris tries to put on his best game.

"Hey, is this Candice?"

"Yes it is, who is this?" 

"It's Chris...Kreider. We met at..." _Shit_. "Uh, we met out with friends a while back. I'm back in the city today and I just wanted to see if you wanted to get lunch or something."

She laughs, and Kreider doesn't quite see what was so funny about that.

"I'm married now, Chris. And I'm six months pregnant, too."

"Oh, uh..." Has it really been that long since he's been out and gotten phone numbers? It can't be - this is just a really old one he never got around to. That must be it. "Right, yeah, congratulations on the...wedding...and the baby. Have a good one, sorry for bothering you."

He hangs up the phone and dials the next number. Maybe going in alphabetical order through the names wasn't the best idea, but he has similar luck with the next seven numbers he tries. Two are married, three are seeing someone, one doesn't answer, and one tries to sell him something from Avon since she has him on the line. By the time the eighth one picks up, he's about to give up.

"This is Danielle," she says, and Chris flops over onto his stomach on the bed, sighing.

"Hey Danielle, this is Chris, we met out with some friends a while back, are you married, pregnant, or selling anything?" 

She's quiet for a moment, then laughs.

"You need a date for something, Chris?"

"Nah. Just for the afternoon," he says, rubbing a hand over his forehead.

"Hmm, I think I'm free after two. You're in the city?"

"Yeah. For a couple days, anyway. Want to meet up for lunch?"

"You know, what the hell, yeah, let's do it." She agrees, and Chris tries to remember what she looks like. It doesn't matter, he's reassured by the fact that he can still get a date with a woman, and in the middle of the day, no less. They arrange a location and agree to meet up around two thirty. He hangs up, and almost immediately after he does, his phone buzzes with an incoming text message. Chris taps the little alert on the top of the screen - the message is from Cam, and it's just a simple question but it's _so_ loaded with possibilities lately. 

_Busy today?_

Chris chews on his lip until it hurts and he has to remind himself to stop, and he doesn't want to text Cam back...but somehow, at the same time, he _does_ want to because he needs Cam to know that this isn't some stupid fairytale he's hoping for, he's not investing all his hopes and dreams in the two of them. He knows full well that he was desperate and angry and needy the other night in Pittsburgh, and while he doesn't regret anything they did, he doesn't want Cam to have the impression that they're doing anything serious. Having sex with Cam, that he can come to terms with. He's gotten over his denial, he can admit that yeah, he thinks Talbot's attractive, yeah, he wants to do all kinds of things to him, but he certainly isn't willing to say that Cam is the _only_ person he wants to do those things with and he doesn't want Cam to think that he is.

_Got a date at 2:30. You?_

Cam doesn't respond to that, and Chris stands up, leaving his phone on the edge of the bed as he gets dressed. It's currently about 11:30 in the morning, so he has plenty of time, but he decides to bundle up and see some things out in the city. 

By the time 2:30 rolls around, he's got a couple of shopping bags with him as he heads into the casual restaurant he and...Danielle, yeah, that was her name, had picked out earlier. This is going to be incredibly awkward, he realizes suddenly. He's here, meeting someone he can't even remember, has no idea what she looks like...

He feels a tap on his shoulder, and spins around, knocking his shopping bags against his legs. 

"Found you," she says. She's pretty cute, Chris thinks, slightly relieved, although he doesn't know why he was worried. She's short, probably a good eight or nine inches shorter than he is. Jet black hair, although he honestly can't tell whether that's her natural color, and grey eyes, and a sort of crooked smile that reminds him of... _oh, fuck off, Talbot, this isn't about you_...well, it's a nice smile. 

"Hey!" he says, enthusiastically. "Was just gonna find a table, c'mon."

They slide into a booth against the wall, and a waitress comes around shortly to give them menus and glasses of water. And then they try to make conversation.

"Seemed like you had fun in Toronto," she says, tentatively, and Kreider nods.

"Yeah, it was okay."

"Okay? You kicked their asses."

"Guess so," Chris says. Ordinarily, he’d love to talk about a game, especially one that went as well as that one did, but at the moment, he’s just not feeling it. And he can’t even decide why. This girl is cute, she apparently watches hockey (or at least, knows who he is and is making a decent effort to pretend she watches hockey)…or maybe she’s just a fan and wants to fuck a professional athlete, but in any case, he should at least be able to get lucky, right? So why can’t he focus on the situation at all? He looks up, away from his phone, which he was sort of unconsciously staring at on the table beside his hand, and realizes that she’s said something to him, although he can’t imagine what it might have been.

“Sorry,” he offers quickly, “I zoned out there for a second.” 

“I could tell,” she nods, looking down at her menu. 

Why hasn’t Cam texted him back yet? Granted, there isn’t a specific response that he’s waiting for, but he’s seriously regretting sending that text about having a date. Why did he feel like he needed to send that to Cam? What was he trying to prove? He feels like he could kick himself, except…at the same time, this is good, right? Cam needs to know that they’re not a _thing_. 

“Or we could get a big thing of onion rings and just split it, and- I lost you again, didn’t I?”

Chris closes his eyes and puts his head in his hands.

“I’m sorry. It’s not you, I promise it’s not you. I have a lot on my mind right now.”

To her credit, she doesn’t seem as pissed off as she probably has the right to be. After all, he called her up. Didn't give her any warning at all, and didn't call her at _all_ after getting her number however many months ago. And now he's got her at a restaurant, and he's not paying any attention to her. He's not sure when he turned into the world's shittiest date, but is sure he's definitely in the running about now. He rubs at his face impatiently, and shoves his phone into his pocket. He's not going to do this. He's not going to sit here with a cute girl and obsess over a text from the guy he's fooled around with twice.

He immediately regrets that thought. Cam's not just some guy. Cam is...Cam. He's Kreider's friend, and they didn't just fool around, they went about as far as two guys can possibly go together, after all. Even if it was in a fit of anger after a really bad game. Even if Kreider had been emotionally compromised at the time and had been acting like a teenager pitching a fit. Why is he trying to push Cam away now, and why does he feel so bad about it? There are really two possibilities here - either they're not doing anything out of the ordinary and there's no reason for him to be obsessing over this at all...or they're getting in far deeper than they should, and he's having trouble with it because he knows they're only heading towards a train wreck that they should turn around right now to avoid.

His phone buzzes, and he doesn’t even look at it, just jerks his head up out of his hands and 

“I gotta go,” he says, feeling like a huge asshole, because he’s dragged this girl out of whatever house she lives in, in the middle of a cold snap, only to bail on her. “I’m really sorry. I just remembered…I mean, I have to…” He doesn’t even have a good excuse, he just has to…

“Chris,” she says, “I get it. You had no idea who I was, but you had my number, and you wanted something to do. Don’t worry about it. You’re not really my type either.”

He lets out his breath, almost relieved, then wonders what she means by _not her type,_ that’s a bit of a hit to his self-esteem, but hey, he’s pretty sure he’s _somebody’s_ type because he’s gotten solid action in the last two days. 

“I’m not?” he says, curiously. She laughs, and gives him a shove as she slips out of her side of the booth.

“Look,” she says, pulling her coat back on, “If you’re ever all _there_ and you want to do something, you have my number.” 

And then she’s gone, and Chris is alone in a nearly-abandoned restaurant at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, and the waitress is there asking if she can take his order. He looks down at the menu, and his phone buzzes again in his pocket.

“Yeah, can you just…can I get two cheeseburgers to go?” He waits until the waitress is gone to pull his phone out of his pocket, and sets it on the table in front of him. 

There are two alerts lighting up the screen, and they’re both text messages from Cam. He stares at the display until it goes dark, and he can’t bring himself to open the messages. What if it says _Fuck you, what am I, just a fuck buddy?_ Or….what if Cam doesn’t care at all that Chris is out on a date? The worst thing of all, Chris realizes, is that he’s not even sure which of those he would rather read. 

He should open them up and read them, because if he doesn’t know what Cam’s said, he’s probably going to have an extra cheeseburger he doesn’t have room for. He feels a sick sensation in the pit of his stomach, that feeling of waiting for something he doesn't want to happen, waiting for an answer he doesn’t want.

He doesn’t know if he can handle Cam caring.

He’s almost one hundred percent certain he can’t handle Cam _not_ caring.

And beyond anything else, he is absolutely sure that he won’t be able to stand reading either of those things via a text message, and he really, really hopes that these are some damned good cheeseburgers, because they’re about to have to get him and Cam through one hell of a conversation.


	11. If I Want to Walk Home with You

Cam is cleaning up his apartment, throwing away old food in the refrigerator, and it's not like he wanted to make big plans anyway because he had things to do. That doesn't mean that he wouldn't postpone his January edition of spring cleaning if Chris had texted him back and suggested they go out and do something. But Chris hasn't texted him back, not since that one text about having a date, and Cam figures he's busy on said date, chatting up some girl and trying to work his magic. Whatever. It's not like he's sitting around dwelling on it. Or the fact that Chris hasn't even read his texts (why Chris has read receipts turned on, Cam has no idea, but he doesn't mind knowing whether his messages have been seen). It must be a hell of a date, if he hasn't even pulled his phone out yet.

Cam checks his phone again just to be sure, makes sure it's not on silent or anything, that he hasn't missed any alerts, then goes back to emptying out tupperware. He throws out two pieces of pizza that are crusty and hard, and is reaching for a half-empty container of sour cream when his doorbell rings. 

Cam stands up, holding the bag full of expired, moldy food, and makes his way to the door, peering through the peephole. Chris is standing there, holding what looks like to-go boxes, two of them stacked on top of each other, and Cam opens the door slowly.

"Hey..." he says, uncertainly. Chris can't even read his texts but he can just...show up at Cam's apartment with food? 

"Can I come in?" Chris asks. Cam stands out of the way.

"Yeah, sure. Aren't you supposed to be on a date?"

"Yes," Kreider answers, but doesn't make any effort to explain any further. "Here. I got you a burger."

"Does it have pickles?"

"I don't know, should it?" Chris goes to the refrigerator and pulls the door open. 

"No." Cam shakes his head. 

"There is nothing in your fridge."

"I know, I just spent the morning cleaning it out." Cam looks down at the garbage bag of old food in his hand, then sets it down in front of the sink. He takes the to-go box, still confused, and opens it up, peering inside.

"You spent your day off cleaning out your refrigerator?” Chris probes.

"It's not even five o'clock yet."

"Fine, you spent _most_ of your day cleaning out your refrigerator?"

Cam shrugs.

"Why do you care so much?"

"I don't care," Chris assures him quickly. "I mean, unless you care. Then I guess…”

Cam totally loses the thread of the conversation then and shoves a french fry into his mouth.

"What the hell are we even talking about?" he asks, uneasily. 

"I...I don't know." Chris grabs the last can of coke out of the refrigerator and opens it. "I was thinking-“ He stops, takes a sip of the coke, and doesn’t say anything more.

Cam waits expectantly. This is the second time in recent memory that Kreider's shown up at his apartment unannounced, and last time...well, last time changed everything. At least last time, though, Kreider seemed to have a  self-assigned mission, a reason for being there.

"Did you just come over to bring me a hamburger?" he wonders aloud. He's looking down at the burger, holding the top half of the bun in one hand as he removes the pickles, and he can feel Chris's eyes practically boring a hole in the side of his head as he does. He wonders if Chris knows that he _does_ have peripheral vision, that he can totally see Kreider watching him like a hawk as he disassembles his hamburger. "Dude, _what_?" he demands finally, looking up. Chris looks away quickly, and Cam wants to laugh at the way he snaps his neck around, like a prairie dog or some shit. He has _such_ a long neck and the coat he's wearing doesn't do anything to hide it, Cam thinks. 

"Nothing," Chris mumbles, jamming his hands into his pockets. "I'm gonna go. I didn't really-uh..." He trails off, leaving no indication of whatever it _is_ he didn’t really.

"Before you eat your burger?" Cam questions, gesturing towards the other box. Chris sighs, and rakes his fingers through his hair. Cam watches him briefly, observing (not staring in a creepy way like Kreider was doing before). "Date really didn't go well, huh?" he asks, trying to keep his tone casual. He still doesn't know how he feels about Chris texting him that. It isn't that they've magically shifted into a state of exclusivity after having sex once, and Cam's not the kind of guy who gets super jealous about these things, anyway. It's not the text that bothers him, or even the date that Chris was on (he hopes he made all this at least partially clear in his texts, although Chris still hasn’t read those yet, according to his phone). 

"I didn't want, uh- I really just needed to..." Chris is obviously having trouble putting a sentence together, and Cam stops fooling with his hamburger and turns around to face him. It's strange, this thing between them. There are moments when they still just feel like friends, really good friends giving each other shit and grabbing beers together or whatever the activity at hand might be. And then there are moments like this, when Cam looks at Chris and he sees soft hair, muscles, eyes, the way his teeth dig into his lower lip when he's thinking, and he doesn't want to just smack him on the shoulder and say _it's cool, man._ He wants to do...well, exactly what he does. Which is to reach over and put a hand at the small of Chris's back, just enough pressure that Chris takes a little step towards him.

"Hey," he says, softly, "what's up?" He frowns in concern, and Chris looks over at him. 

"Please don't go out with anyone," he blurts, and Cam lets his hand fall to his side as he tries to figure out what's prompted that. 

"Well...I'm not the one who _did_ go out with anybody," he points out. "You texted _me_ and said-"

"I know what I said!" Kreider interrupts. "I know. I just...spent the whole time thinking- wondering whether you would care or not. "

"That you went on a date? I'm not your boyfriend, Chris. I don't get to care about that." It sounds much more petulant than he means for it to. 

"Yeah. Yeah, that's true." Kreider looks back down at Cam's hand, the one he had at the base of Chris's spine a few seconds earlier. "I couldn't stay with her there, though, because I couldn't stop asking myself, and I had to come here and ask you if you'd..." He stops there and Cam feels a twinge of nervous sickness in the pit of his stomach. He really hopes Chris isn't about to ask him to make some grand commitment because he's not ready for that, he's really not, can't even think about it without feeling a little sick. 

"Kreids, you're not...asking me to be your..." Ugh, he can't even say it. It's such a stupid word. 

"I'm not asking you to be my anything!" Chris protests. "I'm just...I'm just asking you to not be someone else's something. Until we figure this out.”

That’s definitely not what Cam thought Chris came here to say. Honestly, what he was expecting after the texts he’d sent, after the text Chris had sent him and then the lack of replies to the ones he’d sent back, was for Chris to just…text him back the next day, probably at the last possible unavoidable moment before they ran into each other at the game, and say _look, we had a good time but I really can’t do this, I’m straight and we’re teammates and let’s call this off before it gets to be too late to salvage anything of our friendship._ Because, after all, Cam has thought about sending that very text several times. It would be a hell of a lot easier to just push this to the back burner, go back to playing hockey and just…being friends. 

But that’s not what he wants. And if Chris had read those texts, maybe he would have realized that, maybe not…

Cam reaches around Chris, slides a hand into his back pocket, and pulls out Chris’s phone, handing it to him between the two of them, his eyes never leaving Kreider’s. Chris looks confused at first, but he takes it, slides the screen to unlock it, and obviously catches onto what Cam’s trying to get him to do, because he taps the screen and reads.

“Have fun,” he reads the first message. That’s the one Cam sent when he first got Chris’s message about the date, and it’s just those two words, no punctuation or anything. At the time, he couldn’t figure out what punctuation would even be appropriate. Chris scrolls down to the second message. “Try not to make her any promises…” he reads. “What- what do you mean?”

“I think,” Cam says, trying to choose his words carefully, “I mean what you were just saying. It’s not fair to say all this shit, make each other promises, we both know we’re not going to keep the promises anyway and that’s just dumb, why make promises before you're ready, before you’re gonna keep them? It wouldn’t be fair of me to just…say that you can’t go out with girls when I’m not ready to say I’m not going to go out with girls…not that I have any girls in mind but I’m really sort of-“

“Fuckin’ terrified?” Chris breathes, shoving his phone back into his pocket, and Cam releases a single laugh, a half-chuckle that almost isn’t a sound at all.

“Exactly,” he agrees. 

“I don’t know what the hell we’re doing,” Chris admits, “Or if it’s gonna be anything or if we’ll just wake up in six months and realize we just wanted to…try it out…all along, but if we’re going to figure that out, I want to figure it out with you, not with you and some poor girl who gets dragged into it because one of us is trying to prove something.”

“Okay,” Cam agrees.

“Okay.” Chris echoes. They stand there, a little awkwardly for a few seconds, and then somehow, perfectly in sync, at the exact same moment, just as Cam leans forward, Chris does too, and Cam kisses him, the increasingly familiar tightness in his chest closing in like it’s going to press the air right out of him as Chris opens his mouth against Cam’s. His hands are in Cam’s hair, fingertips still a little cold from the outside air, pressed against the skin of Cam’s scalp, and Cam’s eyelids flutter shut as Chris’s tongue teases across his lips. Kreider pulls away after a few seconds, not even long enough to really leave them both breathless. 

And like that, they come to an understanding. Chris doesn’t belong to him, and Cam doesn’t belong to Chris, but neither of them wants to belong to anybody else right now, either, and that’s just fine with him. It's enough. 

They take their cheeseburgers to the couch, and spend the remainder of the afternoon watching replays of old games. 

— 

It’s actually pretty cool having Columbus in New York on Monday night, or at least, that seems to be the general opinion. There are familiar faces, old friendships that are rekindled briefly before the game, although Cam discovers that he and Kreider might have missed out slightly on that count, because neither of them seem nearly as excited to have some of the guys back in town as the rest of the team. 

Once the puck drops, though, even the other guys are all game. The first period is intense, and at the end of it, they’re tied 1-1. Hank is in net, so Cam’s been watching from the bench. By the time they head out onto the ice after the first intermission, Nash and Dubinsky have both managed to put a goal away and it is, for all intents and purposes, a brand new game at the beginning of the second.

And then, less than a minute into it, Kreider slams Tyutin into the boards and Cam didn’t really _see_ it from where he is, but it doesn’t even really look that bad. He assumes it’s going to be a penalty, and he braces himself for the flood of adrenaline that comes with watching the guys try to kill a penalty (even if he’s just watching it from the bench). But then everything happens all at once, and suddenly it’s a game misconduct and Chris is going off the ice.

Cam comes up off the bench, hot rage surging up into his throat, and there are words on the tip of his tongue that he can’t even seem to spit out. _What the fuck was that? Are you fucking blind? Are you serious?_ He watches, helpless, as Chris disappears off the ice and into the locker room, as Cally discusses the matter with the official, and he tries to force down the anger in his chest, will it into submission because if there’s one thing the Rangers don’t need right now it’s to have their backup goalie tossed out of the game, too. 

The rest of the game goes by in a blur of white-hot rage for Cam. He manages to hide it exceptionally well (or at least, nobody notices or remarks upon his anger). Second period. Third. Overtime. And then finally a shootout that goes about as terribly as Cam’s mood predicts it will, and finally, thank _fuck,_ the whole thing is over.

It hurts, losing at home, especially after they just played so well somewhere else. This is Madison Square Garden, this is _home,_ this is where there are nights where every seat is filled with a fan in a blue shirt, where they’re supposed to have some kind of advantage that they haven’t seemed to be able to capitalize on in a good long while. 

But that’s not the thing that burns in the back of Cam’s mind, that’s not even the half of it. The thought that’s kept him on the edge of his seat, that’s kept him on fire with anger the whole game, is the thought of Chris dealing with this on his own, somewhere away in the locker room, and how much this must be killing him.

Cam sits on the bench a lot of nights, watches the guys take on the opposition without him. But that’s not something Chris is used to, he knows that. It doesn’t even take an uncommon bond between them to figure that out. Chris is out there every night, Chris doesn’t have one other particular person on the team who can step in and try to fill his shoes in a situation like this, not the way Cam does for Hank. 

That's why, as soon as they’re in the locker room, as soon as they start the after-game talk behind closed doors once all the reporters are gone, Cam directs his attention to Kreider. 

The kid’s really handling it well, he thinks, considering. He probably has way more self-control than Cam remembers having himself four years earlier. Cam watches him closely throughout the post-game discussion, waiting for Chris to look at him so he can offer some kind of glance of reassurance, a nod, a smile, a sympathetic head shake, anything...but Chris keeps his eyes locked either on Vigneault or on the floor in front of him, never once looking over at Cam.

Aferwards, after everyone is heading off (sort of dejectedly) to their homes, ready to at least try to get a night of good sleep before the trip to Chicago, Cam lingers for a moment, unsure whether Kreider wants to be bothered. 

Chris doesn’t get up after everyone leaves. He sits on the bench, back hunched under one of those tank tops he loves to wear, and Cam can see his shoulder blades jutting upwards through the grey cloth. His head is down, and Cam doesn’t know where he’s looking, but he isn’t even sure Chris realizes he’s still in the room. He comes to sit down on the bench beside him, and judging by Kreider’s complete lack of reaction, it’s a pretty safe guess that Kreider either already knew he was there or didn’t (and still doesn’t) care.

Cam doesn’t say anything at first, just waits, and eventually, Chris looks up.

“Aren’t you gone yet?” he asks. 

“It was a bullshit call,” Cam answers, although that doesn’t answer the question at all.

“Happens.” Chris says shortly. Cam doesn’t believe for a minute that he’s going to let it go as easily as that.

“Doesn’t make it right,” Cam insists, lifting the baseball cap off of his head and repositioning it. He wonders if Chris deals with most of his unfortunate game experiences the way he dealt with the one in Pittsburgh. Does he always go out and find somebody to bring back to bed with him? Was Cam just convenient?

After a moment of consideration, he decides that he doesn’t mind being convenient. Not tonight, anyway, if that's what Chris needs him to be. He leans over, presses his lips against the skin of Chris’s arm, just on the top curve of his shoulder by the edge of his sleeveless shirt.

“Come home with me,” he says, resting his forehead against Kreider’s shoulder. “I’ll take care of you.”


	12. A Tree For All These Problems

Cam has his arm around Chris’s shoulders in the elevator, which is funny, Chris thinks, because he doesn’t actually remember Cam putting it there. Was it there when they left the Garden? He doesn’t think so. Or when they got out of the cab? Maybe. Maybe Cam just put it there when Chris leaned forward to press the button for Cam’s floor, and Chris sort of leaned back into it. Either way, it would be stupid to deny that he finds it comforting. He’s trying to keep his mind off of the game, but he can’t get it out of his head because…it’s not the penalty, really, he’s taken stupid penalties before and it’s just something you have to shrug off and learn from. 

It’s the misconduct that really gets him because that’s not just saying _you did something wrong_ , it’s implying that he went out of his way to do something to injure another player, and that’s just not how Chris plays the game. His heart is sick over it, and he can’t even find the words to complain about it. That’s why he’s quiet, not because he’s got some overwhelming gift of self-control, but because if he tries to talk about it, he thinks he might _lose_ control. And the scary part is that he’s not sure what form that would really take. Whether he’d yell, hit something…he’s pretty confident he wouldn’t cry or anything but it wouldn’t be pretty and he has a strange reluctance to let Cam see it.

Cam’s fingers curl slightly into his shoulder, his grip tightening as the elevator comes to a stop. Chris hesitates, because he isn’t quite ready to step out of Cam’s grasp, but Cam steps forward and he follows. They still don’t say anything, not even as Cam digs into his pocket and pulls out his keys, dropping his arm from Chris’s shoulders as he unlocks the door. 

The apartment is dark, and Chris hasn’t been there enough times to have memorized the location of all the light switches. He expects Cam to turn on the light, expects that they’ll spend a little time trying to discuss the game, or maybe he’ll go to the refrigerator and comment on the lack of food again, because he’s pretty sure Cam hasn’t gone shopping since the day before. Cam doesn’t move away from him, though. He shuts the door behind them, and there in the darkness, before Chris’s eyes can even adjust to the lack of light, Cam presses him up against the wall in the hallway.

He doesn’t kiss him, doesn’t start trying to do anything with his hands, just presses his weight against Chris’s body, solid and warm and comforting and smelling like cold winter air. Chris isn’t even sure where Cam’s hands are at first, until he feels them at his sides, strong fingers wrapping around him, curving around his ribs under his coat but over his shirt. 

Cam’s head is resting on the wall beside his, and Chris struggles with the weight of the game in his mind for a moment. He’s _still_ not sure whether he’s ready to let it out yet but somehow, having Cam there, not even saying anything, is drawing it out of him like poison out of a wound, pulling the emotion upwards out of his heart until finally his face falls forward into Cam’s shoulder and he shakes his head against the rough cloth of Cam’s coat.

“I tried to stop,” Chris says, and he’s dismayed at how broken his voice sounds. Cam hears it, too, he can tell because he tightens his grip on Chris, wrapping his arms around him.

“I know,” he says, “I know.”

For some reason, it’s more important than anything that Cam believes him. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and wishes he hadn’t because Cam pulls away. 

“No,” Cam shakes his head, lifting one hand to the side of Chris’s face, the other hand fumbling for the light switch and turning it on. Chris blinks his eyes rapidly in protest and surprise, but Cam puts his other hand to the other side of his face and makes him look at him, like getting Chris to look him in the eyes was important enough to turn the lights on for. “Don’t do that. This wasn’t your fault. You didn’t lose that game for us.”

Chris searches Cam’s eyes for patronization, for some indication that Cam’s just trying to make him feel better, but all he sees there is honesty. Cam’s eyes, he thinks, are always honest, that’s one of the things he likes about him. 

“I should’ve been there,” he insists, and Cam leans back, pulls Chris away from the wall, turning him around and steering him towards the living room.

“I’m not letting you do that, blame yourself like that,” he says, and keeps walking through the living room and into the bedroom, pushing Chris ahead of him. Chris stops dead in his tracks in the doorway, halting with one hand against the door jam as he looks in at Cam’s bedroom. It’s not anything special - pretty much what you’d expect the bedroom of a guy who’s rarely at home to look like. But there’s something different about this. About them, being here, tonight. This isn’t a room in a hotel they’ll never have to be in again, or a basement they shouldn’t have been in in the first place. This is Cam’s home, this is a place they’ve been before and will be again many times. 

“C’mon,” Cam says quietly, so close behind him that Chris feels his breath hot on his neck. His hands are on Chris’s hips, urging him forward, and Chris reaches down, wrapping his fingers around Cam’s against his body. Everything they do now, every step they take in this together, feels like falling.

Chris finally makes it to the bed, the light from the hall just enough to navigate the furniture in the bedroom, and sinks down onto the edge of it. Cam stands in front of him for a moment, looking down at him, every angle of his face cast in strange, long shadows. 

“I don’t have any lube,” Cam says apologetically. Chris looks up at him, but doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know if he could handle anything that intense tonight anyway, it’s just…really good to not be going home alone, and it’s even better to be with someone who knows him, someone who knows what he’s going through. 

Cam finally walks around to the other side of the bed, and Chris can hear him taking off his coat and shoes before he feels Cam’s weight as he climbs onto the bed. Then Cam’s arms are around him, and Chris realizes he must be on his knees on the bed behind him because he’s leaning down, his face pressed against the top of Chris’s head, and then somehow they’re falling over, either because Cam loses his balance or because Chris shifts instinctively. They struggle for a moment, trying to get comfortable, Cam trying to get his arm out from underneath Chris’s body, and Chris sits back up.

“Wait, wait,” he manages, shrugging out of his coat and kicking off his shoes, tossing them to the side of the bed. “Okay, there.” He lies back down next to Cam on top of the blankets, rolling over to face him. “It’s alright, we don’t have to…I don’t want you to think…” _That I need you to fuck me whenever we lose a game_. Like he can’t deal with failure without sex, or like he’s not emotionally strong enough to cope with a loss on his own. Logically, he knows that Cam has no reason to think any of that. Cam’s seen him play for a long time, they’ve been playing together for what feels like forever. Cam knows Chris is capable of handling defeat gracefully, he has to.

There is darkness in the space between them; the light from the hall doesn’t reach around the corner to the center of the bed, and Chris stares into the space where he imagines Cam’s eyes are. 

“Thanks,” he says, almost inaudibly. He feels movement, then Cam’s hand is against his face, his right hand on the left side of Chris’s face because that’s the side facing up towards the air. 

“You don’t have to thank me,” Cam assures him. Kreider closes his eyes even though he can’t see anything anyway, and tries to lose himself in the touch. If he focuses on the feeling of Cam’s fingertips on his skin, if he lets that become his world for a minute or two, maybe he can let go of the game, let go of that call, of the hollow, helpless feeling of watching his team lose and knowing he can’t do anything about it.

He doesn’t realize that he’s made a noise until Cam says “What?” and Chris frowns, opening his eyes. 

“I didn’t say anything,” he says, but in retrospect, he’s pretty sure he hummed contentedly.

“Thought I heard something.” Cam says, moving his hand down over Kreider’s shoulder, down to his side to his hip where he rests it momentarily. “Hey, c’mere.” He pulls Chris closer, and Kreider allows it, shifting into the touch as Cam sits up slightly. They wind up with Cam propped up on the pillows against the wall behind the bed, Chris on his back, facing the other direction but his head nested in the crook of Cam’s shoulder, and that’s how they stay for a while. 

“This is super gay,” Chris announces, after a few minutes. Cam laughs, and Chris can feel it against his face through the solid wall of Cam’s chest.

“I mean, on the scale of ‘incredibly gay things we’ve done,’ cuddling’s probably not too near the top,”  he points out, and Chris feels the hot flush of blood rushing into his cheeks. Cam is right, but the memory of Pittsburgh is enough to make the closeness between them take on a sudden warmth that it didn’t have before. He rolls towards Cam, suddenly wishing he’d brought the lube that’s still in his bag at his place, and Cam leans down towards him and their foreheads smack together, painfully and embarrassingly. 

“Shit, sorry,” Cam says, and Chris chuckles. 

“It’s okay, it’s dark.” He reaches up and laces his fingers through Cam’s hair, pulling Cam down towards him, guiding him slowly towards himself until he can lean up and cover Cam’s mouth with his own. 

They’ve done things so much more than kiss, but in spite of that, Chris finds that every time Cam’s lips are on his, he feels a sudden deep longing in the center of his chest, and it’s impossible to ignore or pass off as just nervousness. He feels Cam’s tongue against his, like Cam’s tasting him, trying to figure him out one kiss at a time, like all the questions and uncertainty they have can be solved one kiss at a time. 

It occurs to Kreider in that moment, with Cam's mouth hot and wet against his, that Cam is the most constant thing in his life, and it's not an accident or just happenstance because they work together. Cam's been there for him since...well, since he started this, like he's been trying to make up for all the trouble he's caused. Cam has been giving and giving, never demanding anything. An image floats into Chris's head, of Cam's face in the basement of that hotel, his eyes watering after he finished Chris off with his mouth, but it's not the blowjob Chris is remembering now, it's the look in Cam's eyes, questioning, asking if that's all Chris needs. And he hears Cam's words all over again, burning in his mind... _Whatever you need_. Offering to get himself traded if Chris wants. _What do you need_? Taking Chris slowly and carefully like he's something so precious to be handled with absolute focus and precision. _I'll take care of you._  

Chris pulls back suddenly, burdened with the thought that all Cam has done is be there for him, try to look after him, and all Chris has been doing is either running away or making demands.  

"I don't deserve you," he says, miserably, and is immediately aware of how utterly pathetic that sounds.

"Oh, jeez, Kreids, it was one regular season loss. Please let it go. It kills me to see you all torn up about it like this."

"I don't mean that," Chris shakes his head and wishes the lights were on so he could see Cam's face. "I mean I've been a real dick about this whole thing."

Cam is quiet for a few seconds, considering his answer. 

"I don't think so," he disagrees. "I think you've taken it pretty well."

Chris runs a hand down Cam's chest, tracing the planes of muscle, the hard ridges of his ribs beneath his skin, and he thinks to himself that all he wants in the world is to have Cam close against him like this. Which turns into the same terrified thought he’s been holding back since Christmas…how the hell are they going to make it out of this? And then, even more terrifying, is the thought that well, what if he doesn’t want to make it out? 

He groans and rocks his face into Cam’s collar bone, trying to remind himself that thinking about these things is best left for a time when he’s not wrapped up in Cam, his dick already half-hard and pressed up against Cam’s thigh.

“Yeah,” Cam whispers, in answer to a question Chris hasn't asked, “me too.” And Chris hasn’t even said anything out loud, but somehow he gets the strangest feeling that Cam knows exactly what he’s thinking. That he’s wondering _what if this is it_? What if he’s been looking in the wrong places all this time and Cam is the person he’s supposed to end up with? 

Because despite the fact that this whole thing with Cam just might be the stupidest thing he’s ever done in his life, despite the risk it is to even think about trusting a teammate with his emotions, all he can think is that he feels safe. Like right here, nothing can touch him. And after everything Chris has been through in the last year, after moving up and down and up and down between here and the AHL and not knowing where he’s going to end up any given week…it’s a welcome change, to let himself believe that something is safe, that something might just be permanent. 

That, though, is a sentiment he is almost certain Cam doesn’t share. Just because Cam started this, just because it was him who initiated that first kiss, doesn’t mean that he’s ready to jump into anything, and Chris isn’t naive enough to imagine that it does. 

“I changed my mind,” he says, focusing in on the solid feeling of Cam’s body against his.

“What do you mean?” Cam asks. Chris laughs, and it sounds way more nervous than he means for it to.

“I mean…and this doesn’t have to change anything, like, don’t feel like you have to go back on anything we talked about, I just…” He tries to think of how to say this without it sounding needy and pathetic. “I gotta be honest with myself, and that means being honest with you, too. I’m not gonna go out with any girls. I know we said it was fine and that we’re not _in_ anything, but you, uh…you…this is all I really want, right now. All I have time for.” 

Cam doesn't say anything, he’s quiet just long enough that Chris starts to think _well, that was it, that was the line and I crossed it and now he’s going to ask me to leave_. But when Cam finally speaks, that isn’t what he says.

“Me either,” he admits. “Still scares the hell out of me.”

“What does?” Chris isn’t sure why he bothers asking because he’s 99% sure that Cam’s scared of the same thing he is.

“You do,” Cam says simply. Chris takes a moment for that to sink in. It’s not that he and Cam haven’t been totally open about the fact that neither of them really knows what they’re doing, or that they’re nervous about it, but that thought, it’s very personal…he, Chris Kreider, has that effect on someone like Cam Talbot. It isn’t on a professional level that he finds it staggering, it’s on a personal level, because it’s one thing to respect and like someone as a player and a teammate, but it’s a whole other thing for them to find you attractive enough that it intimidates them. The playing field here is level. They’re both professional hockey players. There’s no real reason for either of them to be impressed by that fact, so if Cam is intimidated by Chris, he figures that must be on the basis of something else entirely. 

“If we keep doing this,” Chris says, not trying to freak Cam out any more or anything, just because it comes to mind, “the guys are gonna find out. Or we’ll have to tell them or something.” 

“Everybody but Cally and Hank, anyway,” Cam nods. Chris thinks about that for a moment, then wonders exactly what Hank knows. He walked in on Cally and Kreider talking about the kiss that first night at Cally’s party, but suddenly he wonders what Cam’s said to Hank. 

“What does Hank know?” he asks, grabbing Cam’s index finger in his hand, wrapping his fist around it. It isn’t quite holding hands, but it’s contact. Cam chuckles.

“It’s funny,” he says, “I get the feeling Hank knows more than we do. I know that’s not- it doesn’t really work that way, but he sort of called it.”

“Called what?” Chris is becoming intrigued.

“I talked to him about things, after he mentioned that he heard you and Cally talking at the party, and he said you were looking at me.”

“Looking at you when?”

“In general. He said you looked at me differently than the other guys. That was just before New Year’s, so…”

“So he was right,” Chris sums up, grinning.

“Guess so.”

They're quiet for a minute or two before Chris shifts slightly.

“I should set an alarm for tomorrow morning,” he says, regretfully, because that means he has to get up and get his phone out of his pocket, which is currently sandwiched between him and the bed. 

“Probably,” Cam agrees, and Chris can feel him nodding. He stands up, first digging his phone out of his pocket, then unbuttoning his pants and sliding out of them. He supposes that at this point, he could just sleep in them, but it isn’t as if Cam hasn’t already seen him without them a million times and it’s dark anyway. He sits back down on the edge of the bed and wakes his phone up, setting an alarm for seven AM. They’ve got the Blackhawks coming up on Wednesday, and he’s sure AV will work them pretty hard the next day. He hears Cam on the other side of the bed, hears the clank of his belt buckle and the _swish_ of fabric falling to the floor, and he pulls the blanket down, getting his legs underneath the sheets as he pulls his shirt over his head.

Cam slides into the bed a few seconds later, and Chris is just starting to wonder if he ought to do something when he feels Cam’s weight shift towards him. In the glow of his phone, he can just see Cam’s eyes, reflecting the gleam of the light, and he moves towards him, putting his head down and burying his face in the blankets near Cam’s chest for a moment. And he knows that Cam said he was going to take care of him and he thinks he has a pretty good idea of what Cam meant by that, but suddenly, all he wants to do is give something back.  

Chis parts his lips slowly, and drags his tongue upwards along the center of Cam’s chest to his neck. Cam sucks in his breath in surprise, probably because Chris gave him absolutely no warning that he was about to do that, and his hand moves to cup Kreider’s shoulder as Chris retraces the line of Cam’s sternum back down, shifting until he’s able to place hot, open-mouthed kisses all the way to Cam’s stomach, his tongue circling Cam’s navel. Cam doesn’t speak, and Chris is just fine with that because he thinks that if Cam does say anything, he might be able to use it as an excuse to talk himself out of doing this, the way he sort of tried to do it and then ended up backing out and getting Cam to fuck him instead back in Pittsburgh. Not that it had turned out badly, but…he wants to see this one through.

He tugs at the waistband of Cam’s boxers, and Cam lifts up obligingly to let him pull them off. Chris is halfway under the blankets now, and he reaches up to push them off of his head because it’s going to be hard enough to breathe with his mouth full, let alone under ten pounds of cloth.

He takes a deep breath, and sucks Cam into his mouth. He’s only half-hard at this point, it isn’t like Chris did anything to get him worked up beforehand, but he can feel him hardening between his lips as he circles his tongue around the head of Cam’s cock. Cam’s hips rise upwards slightly, but he’s still not hard enough for it to pose any risk of choking Chris, who lifts one hand up, running it over the surface of Cam’s thigh until he comes to the center, cupping Cam’s balls in his hand and squeezing gently. That elicits the first real sound Cam’s made since he started, a quiet moan that makes Chris feel like a fucking champion. He did that, he made Cam make that sound. Cam threads his fingers through Chris’s hair, gently holding Chris’s head against his body, and rocks his hips upward again. This time, he’s completely hard, and the tip of his cock brushes against the back of Chris’s throat.

He suppresses the cough that threatens to spill out of him, and swears that he’s not going to gag, because he’s going to figure this out and he’s going to make it good for Cam. If he can’t succeed at anything else tonight, this is going to be the one thing he does right. He tries to think back on every blow job he’s ever gotten, what he liked, what he didn’t like, and he rests one hand on the bed, supporting the weight of his upper body, his other hand moving to wrap around the base of Cam’s erection, moving in tandem with his mouth. 

“Oh my god, Chris,” Cam says, and he sounds so distant when he says it, like he’s not even fully there, like he’s losing himself somehow. The words send a surge of blood straight between Chris’s legs, and he wants so badly to be touched, but he can’t use the hand that’s holding him up on the bed and he’s not about to stop what he’s doing with the other. “Don’t stop,” he begs, and Chris has no intention of doing so, but he hums in reassurance. The vibrations must do something pretty good for Cam, because his hips arch almost immediately and Chris has to pull away slightly to avoid choking. “Sorry, sorry,” Cam breathes absent-mindedly, his fingers kneading at Chris’s scalp, twisting strands of his hair around his fingertips. Chris just takes that as reassurance that he’s doing something right, and quickens his movements. Cam’s breath quickens, and he moans again, and then he’s saying things, filthy things that almost make Chris blush, not because he’s never heard dirty things but because he’s never been on the receiving end of anything like that.

“Fuck, yes, like that,” Cam says, following up a whole torrent of comments about Chris's mouth and how perfect it is for this sort of thing. “Don’t stop. God, Chris, I’m gonna come…" Holy shit, Chris thinks. Has Cam always sounded this Canadian? Probably…it’s just that everything sounds a little clearer, everything is a little more intense just then. And is Cam really going to come already, he wonders, because he’s only been doing this for a minute or two, hardly long enough for that…although, honestly, he feels like he’s not far off from coming in his own boxers if Cam just touches him. He doesn’t stop, although he feels nervousness rising inside of him because what if he can’t do this, what if… 

He wills himself to calm down. He’s already tasted Cam before, in that hotel basement, on his own hand after jerking Cam off up against that wall, and it wasn’t a bad taste. He knows, in theory, what to do, even if he’s never done it before. 

He takes Cam a little deeper, slowing down just slightly as he presses his head down, feeling Cam in the back of his throat, and he tries to relax his jaw, tries to take all of Cam into his mouth. He doesn’t even quite make it all the way before Cam’s grasp tightens almost painfully in his hair. 

“Now, now,” Cam says desperately, and Chris knows that means that if he doesn’t want to swallow, he needs to get off right then, but he _does_ want it, and he lifts his head slightly, sliding Cam out of his mouth halfway, then back down, taking him all the way in. And then Cam shudders and comes into Chris’s mouth, hot and salty and bitter, and Chris fights the urge to try to swallow, holding himself in place as Cam rides out his orgasm, panting, his legs shaking underneath Chris’s hands, which he places flat on Cam’s thighs. Then, finally, when Cam stops moving and lets out a long, shaky breath, Chris pulls away, letting Cam slide out of his mouth before he swallows. Cam has a hand around his upper arm, pulling Chris upwards towards him, and Chris goes along with it as Cam pulls him against his chest.

“I love you,” Cam mutters, and Chris freezes completely. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M SORRY for the ending. A POV shift is entirely necessary and this chapter got a little crazy long anyway and I promise I'll pick back up at the beginning of the next one :P
> 
> Thank you soooo much to everybody still reading this - it's turned into this great long epic of blah that I never expected it to when I started it, and now I'm feeling like I'm going to have to finish out the season with these two. 
> 
> Also...I see all these people around here collaborating/cowriting/roleplaying and whatever, and well, if anyone ever wants to write anything about the Rangers...
> 
> *whistles and wanders off*


	13. Those Things Worth Keeping

The second Chris stops moving, just goes stiff beside him, Cam starts to come out of his sex-dazed stupor. Immediately he realizes that something he had absolutely no intention of saying has just slipped out, and the worst part is, he’s not even sure he means it. 

“Oh, shit,” he mutters. Kreider leans over him and turns the lamp on, a hand at his own crotch, probably trying to persuade his erection to go away, and Cam blinks and lets out a noise of protest. 

“Do we need to talk?” Chris asks, sitting up and squinting at him. “Again?”

Cam covers his eyes with his hand, partially because the light is bright, partially because he doesn't like the way Chris is looking at him.

"No, no, I- that's really embarrassing, I didn't even mean to say that. You just..." He pulls the blankets back up to his waist, suddenly very conscious of the fact that he's sitting there naked. Chris eyes him briefly.

"I'm fuckin' awesome at giving head?" he guesses. "It's okay. You don't have to tell me. I know, I've been training for this moment my whole life."

That whole statement is so un-Chris-like that Cam has to do a double-take before he even processes the words, and even then it takes him a couple seconds longer to register it as a joke. When he does, a surprised laugh bursts out of him, and he relaxes slightly. Because he knows, he knows they're on the same page here, knows that Chris knows Cam doesn't _love_ him, not like that, not yet. It's been less than two weeks since they started this, and while Cam could make a good case for being exceptionally fond of Chris as a person, they both know that falling in love doesn't happen that quickly. 

"I take it back," he says, reaching behind himself to fluff up the pillows. "You know I'm not in love with you."

Chris looks unfazed.

"Yeah, I figured," he nods. "Just wanted to double check."

"How do we want to do this?" Cam asks, gesturing between them. He means the whole situation - if they've both decided that this is all they're interested in right now, he isn't sure if they're going to do the whole going-out-on-dates thing or if they're going to just keep fooling around after games and talking about feelings. Chris looks confused, though, so Cam specifies. "I mean, you and me. Us. You want me to take you out to dinner or something?"

Kreider laughs, and Cam frowns questioningly.

"I just had this mental image of us going out to some fancy restaurant and you opening doors and pulling my chair out for me and stuff."

Cam kicks him lightly in the shin. 

"Not a chance. You have to pull _my_ chair out."

"Oh, that's how we're doing this?"

Cam shrugs.

"Guess it depends on who's pitching and who's catching, eh?" he says, and is smugly satisfied when Chris blushes slightly and ducks his head. He's such a contradiction, Cam thinks - he's a force to be reckoned with on the ice, fast, powerful, stronger than he even seems to be aware of sometimes, but like this, sitting on Cam's bed in the yellow glow of the lamplight, embarrassed by a dumb comment…it reminds Cam how young Kreider still is, and… 

"Eh?" Chris says, and Cam realizes he's repeating him. "Ehhhh?" 

Cam glares at him evenly.

"If you're going to start that, you can leave," he says, and Chris nudges him with his elbow. This is good, Cam thinks, this...whatever it is. One minute Chris is doing earth-shattering things to him with his mouth, the next minute he's using that same mouth to give Cam shit about his accent or whatever. 

And god help him, Cam does love it _._

—

Chicago is a fucking polar wasteland, and Cam is well aware of the record his team has against the Blackhawks on their own ice. It isn’t his game to lose, but he’s all nerves watching nonetheless. They go up by two quickly, and the early lead is welcome but unexpected. Chicago fighting back to tie it up in the second is neither of those things, and once they do, Cam finds himself hoping fervently for Hank's sake that this doesn't go to another shootout.

He finds Lundqvist during the second intermission, intending to give him some reassuring words of encouragement. Hank has helped him out a lot lately, not just when it comes to technique, but during the couple of conversations they've had about personal things...and Cam wants to be able to return the favor, but he can't really think of anything good to say.

"You got this," is what he eventually settles on, and while it's trite and not at all helpful from the standpoint of helping Hank's game, Lundqvist gives him a lopsided smile.

"We do," he nods, glancing around at the other guys. Cam adjusts his hat, tugging at the brim of it, his eyes following Kreider, who's across the room, leaning over doing something to his skates. Lundqvist doesn't even follow his glance, but he raises an eyebrow. "Focus, Cam," he says, but he's still smiling. Cam looks down at his feet quickly, but it takes all of about five seconds before his glance has drifted upwards again. It's not like he thinks Kreider is the most beautiful creature ever to walk the earth, not like he's utterly bewitched and can't stop staring at him, it's just that there's something really fascinating about his dedication, the way nothing gets to him when he's in his game. The rest of the room is buzzing with at least three different conversations, and it isn't that Chris ignores all of them, he answers questions here and there, laughs at jokes, he's just obviously somewhere else in his mind and the somewhere else, it's apparent to Cam, is out there on the ice. 

"He's really gonna be good," Cam muses. He doesn't even realize he's said it out loud until Lundqvist responds.

"Going to be?" he questions. Cam smiles, sheepishly. 

"Well, I wouldn't want him getting cocky," he points out, chuckling quietly.

"He can't hear you," Hank assures him. Cam knows he's right, knows that even if Kreider weren't on the other side of a noisy locker room, he's far too absorbed in his own thoughts to catch anything of their conversation. Hank stands up and smacks Cam on the shoulder with his glove gently. 

"Be careful with that one, Cam," he says, on his way out of the room. "You're both pretty important here." 

The third period is intense, to say the least. Hagelin manages to fire a shot into the right side of the net, and they're up by one again. From then (for Cam anyway), it's a matter of sitting and willing the clock to run out faster. There's a burst of shots right near the end that almost has him covering his eyes, but Lundqvist manages to hold them off, and at the end of the twenty minutes, the Rangers have won it.

They're all exhausted, but ecstatic by the time they file back into the locker room. The interviews and questions go by in a whirlwind, even for Cam, who spends the time quietly changing out of his gear, listening in on the questions and wondering what they're going to do after the game. They don't play again until Dallas comes to New York on Friday, and Cam suspects at least some of the guys will be up for some kind of celebration. 

If it wasn't minus a million degrees outside, they'd probably all go out to a bar, Cam thinks. He hasn't actually been drunk since...wow, since before Christmas? For a while it was because he didn't want to do anything, say anything he'd regret, try anything in a drunken haze that he wouldn't try sober, but now...he glances over at Kreider, thinking that there isn't really that much left that they haven't tried...and the one thing they haven't quite done, Cam's pretty sure he wants to be a little buzzed for anyway. 

Cam ducks into the showers, but he doesn't take long, just long enough to wash off the sweat of sitting on the bench in gear all night, before emerging and heading back over to the bench where he left his stuff. He looks back over at Kreider again as he digs a clean t-shirt and his baseball cap out of his bag. Chris, it appears, has finally started letting his game-time focus slip, and he's joking around with Brassard and John Moore a few feet away from the bench Cam's sitting on.

"What do you think, Cam?" Cally asks from his other side. Cam has absolutely no idea what the question even was; he tries to figure it out based on what everyone else is saying, but they're quiet and expectant all of a sudden. When Cam doesn't answer, Pouliot grabs a roll of tape off of the bench next to him and chucks it in his direction.

Cam looks up, snatching the tape out of the air effortlessly (goaltending reflexes and all).

"What's that about?" he asks, grinning and throwing the roll of tape back in Pouliot's direction. Cally repeats the question, but Cam doesn't hear it that time either, thanks to Kreider. 

"A-boat..." he hears Chris say under his breath, and he turns a disapproving glance on the younger man. 

“Is this gonna be a thing with you now? Listen, kid, you're in the wrong sport to start making fun of Canadians."

"I'm not making fun of Canadians," Chris says, his eyebrows raised challengingly. "I'm making fun of _you_."

Cam throws his hat at him. 

"Jesus," McDonagh snorts, "are you two _flirting_?"

Cam doesn't look at Chris, because he absolutely knows what he's going to see if he does - Chris's ears tipped pink in embarrassment, awkward silence written across his face. Cam doesn't know what to say either but he has to say something, because if he doesn't, the sudden quiet will be too much to explain. 

"Maybe," he says, looking McDonagh in the eyes. "Why, did you call dibs?"

There's a split second of confusion in McDonagh's eyes before he laughs. "Nah, man, all yours.”

Cam feels Chris hit his hand with the brim of Cam’s own hat, and he takes it, wrapping his fingers around the stiff cloth, still not daring to look over at him. Kreider’s fingers brush against his as he takes the hat, but Cam wills himself to keep his eyes on McDonagh’s until Ryan looks away. 

Cally clears his throat.

“So, yeah, bar or just grab some stuff and head back to somebody’s room? Probably yours and Hank’s, ‘cause it turns into a double with mine and G’s.”  

Cam _does_ exchange a glance with Chris then, because the truth of the matter is, he didn’t sleep in the room with Hank the night before. He can feel Lundqvist’s eyes on him from the other side of the room, and he doesn’t really know what to say, so he nods.

“Yeah, if that’s cool with you?” he says, looking at Hank questioningly. Lundqvist shrugs. 

“Sure. Bring the party to my place,” he says easily. He’s all smiles, obviously still on his postgame high. Cam tries to think of a way he can get Chris alone before everyone descends on the hotel room that was supposed to be his. He has no idea what Chris told Pouliot when he and Cam switched rooms the night before, because he was already gone when Cam got to the room. He’ll just try to sit next to Chris on the way back and-

“Cam, come with me to the store?” Cally says, and suddenly Cam gets the feeling that this is a setup. Not like…a nefarious, evil, lure the backup goalie into an alley and stab him kind of setup, but Cally’s trying to get him alone. It gives him the ominous sense that the one-on-one conversation he’s been trying really hard _not_ to have with his captain is about to happen whether he wants it to or not. 

“Yeah, sure,” he agrees. He can’t just…refuse, not when he’s the person in the room with the least possible excuses to avoid going to the store. He just spent the whole game on the bench, if anybody’s going to be carrying twenty guys’ worth of bottles of alcohol, it should probably be him. 

And that’s how Cam comes to be sitting next to Cally in a cab about a half hour later, looking down at his phone, trying to figure out what to text Chris.

_What does Benny know?_ is what he finally settles on, tapping out the message much more slowly than he really needs to, because after he finishes texting he doesn’t really have any reason to avoid Cally’s glance. It’s stupid, he thinks. Cally _knows_. Cam knows that Cally knows, it isn’t even that he suspects it or has a hunch or whatever, because he knows for a fact that Chris has had at least one discussion with him about the matter, and he personally exchanged a couple of words with him on New Year’s.  But…

Cam remembers one time, back when he was about fifteen, and he took a girl out. They went to a movie or something. But before he took her out, he had to go to her house and meet her dad. It was terrifying. He sat there for thirty minutes and listened to the girl’s father talk about responsibility and respect and really, really thinly veiled allusions to the sex they definitely _would not be having if Cam wanted to live to see sixteen,_ and by the time he finished, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to go on the date anymore.

For some reason, this reminds him of that. 

Cally clears his throat, and Cam closes his eyes, waiting for the inevitable. He doesn’t want to be the one to break the silence, but Cally doesn’t say anything either, and Cam peers out the window, his breath fogging up the glass as he wonders how many liquor stores are actually going to be open. It’s Chicago, though…they’re used to this stuff, and at least the cab driver seemed to have a good idea where to go after Cally told him what they need. Finally, after a couple moments of torturously awkward silence, Cam opens his mouth to say something, and that’s when his phone buzzes. He looks down at Chris’s reply to his text message.

_I haven’t told him anything but he’s not stupid. Why?_

Cam taps out his reply quickly, and feels like Cally’s eyes are on him, like Cally knows who he’s talking to, what he’s talking about, everything.

_My stuff is still in your room. Benny’s is still in Hank’s. Everyone’s going to Hank’s room._

He sees Chris typing a response immediately, and figures he must be watching his phone as closely as Cam is. 

_I don’t think the guys will be going through the luggage?_ Chris replies, and Cam laughs out loud, nervousness and relief bursting out of his chest in a chuckle because Chris is right, it isn’t like the guys are going to go around sniffing the furniture and digging through the bags, drawing conclusions and making accusations like _wait just a damned minute, this pillow smells like Pouliot’s shampoo, not yours._

“What’s up?” Cally asks, and Cam writes a quick _true enough_ back to Chris before answering.

“Nothing, just…taking requests.” He immediately regrets lying to Cally, but telling the truth just isn’t happening right then. “Kreids wants Malibu rum.”

Cally apparently finds that about as amusing as Cam is pretending he does, because he laughs, too.

“Wow, alright,” he says, as the cab pulls to a stop outside of a brightly-lit liquor store. “We’ll just be ten minutes,” he tells the driver, opening his door and climbing out of the car. Cam follows, tapping with one thumb to text Chris _btw when we get back please pretend you asked me for malibu rum._ He doesn’t even wait for a reply, just shoves his phone into his pocket and follows Cally into the store. 

“So, you and Kreider,” Cally says, grabbing a 24-pack of Heineken out of one of the refrigerators. Wow, Cam thinks, he’s not even going to try to work it into the conversation…just going right to it. But then, that’s Cally. He didn’t get made captain of a professional hockey team for his ability to beat around the bush. Cam picks up a bottle of gin.

“Mhm,” he says, because it would be rude to disregard the comment, but it wasn’t exactly a question that has an answer.

“You guys have worked stuff out.” Cally says, and again, it’s not a question.

“Yeah, we’re good,” Cam nods.

“I can tell.” Cally grabs a bottle of something Cam can’t read, and moves to the counter to put down the stuff he’s got so far. Cam feels his pulse quicken slightly.

“You can?” he asks quickly, without really thinking. Cally turns back around and stands in the aisle across from him, inspecting the bottles.

“Cam, c’mon. You know why I got you to come with me.”

“I was hoping it was for my great liquor-toting abilities.” 

Cally rewards him with a slight grin, but they both know Cam’s avoiding the issue.

"Are you a thing?" Cally asks, point blank. Cam presses his lips together and plays with his hat.

"I..." He doesn't really know the answer to that. Does mutually agreeing not to fuck anybody else make them a thing? He isn't sure. What he does know is that if he says no, if he says that he and Chris aren't a thing, it'll feel much more like a lie than if he says yes. So he nods slowly. "I think we are," he says carefully. "I mean, we're not...getting really serious, like it's not a...it's only been a couple of weeks."

“Hey, relax.” Cally says. “I have zero problem with you two doing whatever you want to do. I told Chris that, too. I just gotta look out for both of you.”

Cam’s getting a little confused.

“Cally,” he shakes his head, “Look, man, I appreciate all of this and I know you’re just doing your whole captain thing, but Chris and I are capable of handling whatever people say about-“

“I know, I know,” Cally interrupts. “This isn’t about what people are going to say. I mean, if you’re gonna do this kind of thing in pro sports, the NHL is probably the place to do it. This is about you two, like, as people.”

Cam finishes gathering up the things he thinks they’ll need, and sets them down on the counter as Cally does the same.

“What’re you getting at?” he asks, as Cally pulls out his wallet. Cally stops, taps his credit card on the counter thoughtfully, then looks over at Cam, meeting his eyes easily, commanding his attention despite the few inches of height Cam has on him.

“Cam,” he says seriously, “Don’t you break that kid’s heart.” 

Cam flushes, and opens his mouth to protest, because why does everyone keep telling him to be careful? Like Chris is some delicate flower that Cam's going to trample all over with his great big manly lack of empathy. But Cally keeps going.

“I’m not finished,” he says. “Don’t let him break yours, either. This team needs both of you. Intact, as in, at full strength. Not avoiding each other and being angry and bitter to the point that one of you gets traded because of a breakup gone really bad.”

Cam is about to say something about how it’s not really just his decision to make when the cashier comes out of the back room. The guy doesn’t act like he recognizes them, but still, Cam doesn't want to deal with the fallout of some random guy knowing about his relationship and deciding to tell a bunch of people, so he stays quiet. They get the alcohol packed up into paper bags, and head back out to the taxi, struggling into the back seat under all the bottles they’re holding in their arms.

They don’t say much on the way back to the hotel - Cam has a “ _wtf. why?”_ text from Chris waiting on his phone, but he has his hands full of alcohol and doesn’t answer it.

The cab driver drops them off at the hotel, and Cally pays him as Cam unloads the bags onto the ground outside the car. Shit, it’s cold. 

“G!” Cally says, his voice booming off of the walls of the hotel. “G, get out here!” The door to one of the rooms on the balcony overhead swings open, and Girardi puts his head over the railing. “Come help us carry this.” Cally waves a hand at him, and Girardi comes down the stairs, swearing loudly about it being the beginning of another ice age. The three of them get the alcohol up to the room, where the guys have opened the adjoining door between the suites. It makes a space that’s still not really big enough for all of them, but no one’s complaining about the closeness on a night like this. 

Chris is sitting on the floor at the foot of one of the beds in front of the tv, his hair awry, wearing sweatpants and a Boston College t-shirt, but he stands up when they come in the door.

“Where’s my fruity coconutty goodness?” he asks, deadpan. Cam sets his bag of liquor down on the table and points at it, and Chris comes over, stepping over Zuccarello and Hagelin, who are also sitting at the end of the bed. He leans over the bag, poking into it with one hand, his other hand hovering at the small of Cam’s back. It’s not really an affectionate gesture...he's not even really touching Cam much, his hand is just sort of ghosting right above Cam's shirt, just close enough that Cam can feel the brush of his fingertips on the other side of the cloth. It’s totally excusable, given the lack of space and where he and Cam are standing, but Cam can’t help feeling like absolutely _everyone_ is watching them. He waits, standing still, for Chris to move his hand, which Kreider does as soon as he pulls the bottle of Malibu rum out of the bag. Cam finally turns around then. He’s genuinely surprised to find that no one is looking at them at all, other than Cally, who gives him a single nod before walking through the door between the rooms to join the rest of the guys. 

This’ll probably be a hell of a party, Cam thinks. He doesn’t have anything to worry about. These are their teammates.  They’re all going to have a fantastic time. Cam expects they’ll remember this forever as the night they beat the Blackhawks in Chicago in regulation and then went on to drink way more than they should and nearly froze to death in a polar vortex.

What he doesn’t expect is that he and Chris will remember it forever as The Night Everyone Found Out.


	14. The Days That Bind You Together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's talk about how I tried to write a stupid novel in November and couldn't get 50K words out but now I'm writing about hockey players getting it on and I've churned out nearly 40K without really thinking about it.
> 
> On second thought, let's not talk about that :P
> 
> Chapter title is from "Bad Blood" by Bastille
> 
> Also, I've realized that I use at least like seven different nicknames for basically every player referenced in this (you know, Brassard/Brass/Derick, Richards/Brad/Richie, etc) and I sincerely apologize to anyone who has trouble keeping track of them :P

 

“What’d I miss?” Cam asks, sitting down on the bed behind Kreider, who’s returned to his spot with his bottle of rum. He's still not sure why he _has_ this bottle of rum, and why Cam wanted him to pretend like he'd asked for it. He spent a couple minutes trying to guess, but after not really being able to come up with a plausible explanation, he gave up before Cam and Cally even got back. Now he's just staring at the bottle.

He shrugs.

“Nothing really. Took everybody a while to get here.”

“Sorry, it’s pretty nasty out there.”

Chris shakes his head quickly; he wasn’t talking about Cam and Cally taking a while, he was talking about the rest of the team, some of whom are only arriving just now, judging from the noise from the other room. 

“No, I just meant, some of the guys wanted to go get stuff from their rooms, they’re just now dragging in. Thanks for the…ugh.” He looks down at the bottle, screws the lid open and takes a swig, making a face. “This is gross.”

“So what are we doing?” Cam asks, and Chris shrugs. They haven’t really discussed it yet; there was talk of some of the guys putting on a movie in the other room, but nobody’s made any plans yet over here. 

“Hank and DZ were going to put on a movie,” Pouliot says, coming out of the bathroom. “We’re waiting for-“

There’s a knock on the outside door. Hagelin gets up, being closest, and opens it for Brassard and John Moore. Brassard is carrying a deck of cards, which he holds up triumphantly. 

“Anyone want to play?” he asks. Chris, glad for something to do, nods. 

"I'm in,” he says. “What are we playing for?”

“Bragging rights,” Moore says, sitting down cross-legged in the spot by the end of the bed that Hagelin’s just vacated. Carl makes a noise of dissatisfaction, but goes to get a drink instead of putting up a fight over the seat. In the meantime, Brassard also takes a seat, finishing out most of the semi-circle that’s formed by Chris, Zuccarello, McDonagh, and now Moore. Cam stays on the bed behind Kreider.

Brad steps through the door between the two rooms.

“Are we doing anything interesting in here?” he asks.

“‘Bout to play some cards,” Cam says, gesturing towards the deck Brassard is now shuffling. “Got any cash on you?”

“Bragging rights!” John repeats, insistently.

“You can’t keep a tally of bragging rights, Johnny.” Brass points out. “Not like…a final score. If you win you get bragging rights but you have to win _something_.” 

“Fine,” Moore sighs, digging into his pocket and pulling out a stack of one dollar bills.

“Three guesses where Johnny was headed tonight…” Hagelin says, and everyone laughs, because Moore looks _so_ embarrassed that Chris suspects Carl might actually be right. 

“I’ll stay,” Richards shrugs, “They’re watching _A River Runs Through It_ in there and I sort of wanted to do something that doesn’t make me want to fall on a skate.”

Everyone throws in some cash, and they divide it up evenly just so everyone has something to bet. Brassard deals out the cards, and Kreider takes his, shooting a glance over his shoulder at Cam.

“You can’t sit there,” he complains, “you can see my cards from there.”

Cam pushes at the back of his head with the hand that isn’t holding his cards.

“So I can see your shitty cards,” he says, “It’s not like you’re gonna win with those anyway.”

McDonagh laughs.

“Thanks for the tip, Talbot.” He throws an extra ten dollars into the pot.

“Dude. C’mon,” Chris reaches up with an arm, swatting at whatever part of Cam he can reach blindly (which ends up being his knee). “Not cool. I want a re-deal.” He shoves his cards back in Brassard’s direction, and Derick obliges, dealing him a new hand. Chris keeps it face down and glares up at Cam, who sighs and moves off of the bed, pulling up one of the chairs from the table and putting it in the only empty spot remaining in their tight little circle.

“Happy?” he asks, and Chris nods smugly before looking down at his cards. It’s actually a much worse hand than the one he had before, but he’s not going to give Cam the satisfaction of knowing that, so he plays it through.

The first two hands don’t go very well for Kreider, but he somehow wins with a pair of nines on the third. By the fourth, he’s ready to get serious (or maybe that’s the quarter bottle of coconut rum talking).

Chris looks down at his two aces and two threes, and glares fiercely at the lone seven of diamonds that's fucking with his perfect hand before he realizes that glaring at his cards is probably the opposite of having a good poker face. He looks to the center of the sort-of circle, and waits for Brassard to turn over the next card. It just needs to be a three or an ace, and he's pretty sure he's got this. 

Brass flips over the top card off the deck, and it's the ace of spades. Chris saves his reaction until he thinks they’ve all played their hands, at which point he pumps a fist in the air and whoops. Richards groans and puts his head in his hands.

“I knew I should have stayed and watched the movie.” he laments.

“Oh, C’mon,” Kreider says, dragging the pile of money towards himself. “You know you enjoy getting your ass kicked.”

“Wait, wait!” Zuccarello hurries back from the liquor table, holding his cards out in front of him.

“Damn it, Zucc, you can’t play after everybody else has already played. You didn’t even bet last round.” Chris protests. As far as he’s concerned, going for a refill in the middle of a round is totally unacceptable.

“But I win.” Zuccarello leans forward enthusiastically to play his cards, and apparently forgets completely that he has a drink in his hand because his cup falls, hitting the edge of the bed and falling directly onto John Moore's back. John yelps, jumps up, and manages to spill his own drink all over the floor next to the cards.

“ _Tabarnak_ , Johnny!”  Brass hastily gathers the cards up so the liquid doesn't ruin the deck. “Someone grab a towel from the sink?”

“It wasn’t my fault!” Moore protests, writhing awkwardly as he tries to get the ice that’s fallen down the back of his shirt against the bed. “Zucc threw his drink at me. I have very powerful reflexes.”

“I didn’t throw it,” Zuccarello protests. “I dropped it. Not on purpose.” 

Cam goes to the bathroom, grabs one of the hand towels that’s hung beside the sink, and throws it at Moore, who begins dabbing at his shirt with it. Eventually, he gives up and strips out of his shirt, although he still keeps squishing at it with the towel like it’s going to miraculously become dry enough to wear again.

“Well,” Pouliot says, “I’m going to use this intermission to get a refill.” He stands up carefully, avoiding the puddle of liquid that’s still seeping into the carpet, and makes his way to the table by the door.

“This is ruined,” John complains, probably a little melodramatically given that the shirt he’s trying to nurse back to health is just a long-sleeved jersey knit t-shirt of sorts. “Cam, can I borrow a shirt? I don’t wanna go back out shirtless.”

Cam freezes, and Chris feels his own breath catch in his throat. Cam can't lend John a shirt because the only shirt Cam has in the room is the one he's wearing. Because that bag by the bed isn't his, it's Pouliot's, and he can't just go and take Benny's shirt and loan it to somebody. Chris looks at Pouliot, mentally trying to send him the pleading thought - _Don't say anything. Please don't say anything,_ but Pouliot is refilling his drink and doesn’t even see him.

“Oh, that’s not Cam’s stuff, it’s mine,” he says quickly, pointing at his bag over his shoulder. “You can get whatever you want out of it.”

John is too caught up in struggling with his liquor-soaked shirt to ask questions, but Derick, who's shuffling the cards, looks confused.

"Why would you bring all your stuff, like it's not crowded enough in here..." he comments absent-mindedly. Chris feels like he's watching the whole situation in slow motion, like in a dream, where he's watching it happen but can do absolutely nothing to stop it.

"'Cause Cam and I switched so he could stay in-" He stops short in the middle of his sentence because he finally sees Chris's face. It's like watching the first domino in a long line fall because Chris can see the exact moment that Pouliot figures it out and he sees Benny look between Cam and Chris, watching them both, taking in the way Cam's just _standing_ there, the way Chris is staring at him. Pouliot's eyes widen, the light goes on in them, like he's just seen the ending of a movie with a really dramatic twist. His mouth opens slightly and the look on his face slowly changes from _holy shit_ to _oh shit I've said too much_. 

"Who wants a refill?" he says, much too loudly, trying to change the subject, but the damage is done because the second domino falls and it's McDonagh, no doubt thinking back to the exchange he had in the locker room with Cam.

"Oh my god..." McDonagh says slowly, watching Pouliot, then Cam, then Chris. "Oh, my _god._ Holy shit. Are you guys-"

It's a moment in which, if Cam and Chris are really careful, if they feign the appropriate level of confusion and disgust, they can probably still take this back, can probably still smooth things over. But Chris doesn't have the words, they're just not there, and he's losing his window of opportunity to do anything about this at all. He gives McDonagh a _look_ , and, well, Ryan's not an asshole, he can obviously tell that Chris wants him to shut up and he does, although suspicion and shock are written across his face in the most obvious way imaginable and then Derick is looking up too, trying to figure out what they're talking about.

"What's going on?" says Cally, from the doorway. No doubt he heard the commotion over the spilled drink and came to make sure they're not wrecking the hotel room. Chris looks at him, and realizes that he probably looks like a deer staring down into the lights of a semi coming down the highway far too quickly for him get out of the way. He knows he probably looks like he's in a state of panic but he doesn't expect Cally to do anything about it. For one, it's not like Cally would know the right lie to tell either, and two, Cally's made it clear from the start that this is Chris and Cam's problem to deal with, no one else's. But it takes Cally about ten seconds of looking around for his glance to center back on Chris, at the panicked look on his face, and at least Chris knows that Cally understands what it is they’re on the brink of.

Chris looks over at Cam. Cam has his hands in his pockets and he's staring down at the cards, kicking at Chris's pair of threes with his toe, like focusing on keeping those two cards together is enough to mend the whole situation if he concentrates hard enough. 

"I'm wondering that, too, Cally.” McDonagh says, looking between Cam and Chris.

John is digging through Pouliot's bag now, pulling out a shirt, but he stops short as he stands up, freezing as he takes in the expressions on the various faces throughout the room. Chris counts them all quickly. Moore, Cally, Brassard, Pouliot, McDonagh, Hagelin, Richards, and Zuccarello. Everyone else is still in the other room, and Cally looks at Chris questioningly. He doesn't say anything, but the question is there. _What do you want to do?_ Chris looks back to Cam, who is still, infuriatingly as it may be, staring down at the cards, and gets no assistance there. 

The silence is the final nail in the coffin. Hagelin and Zuccarello were, up until everyone else went quiet, bickering over the last can of Heineken, but now even they stop talking and look around uncertainly. For a moment, the only sound in the whole room is the sound of the movie through the door.

_“…it is those we live with and should know who elude us…”_ says Robert Redford somewhere in the other room. Derick gives the cards one last flip through and sets them down in front of him, looking up expectantly because no one has actually answered Cally's question yet.

"Can you guys give me the room?" Cally asks. "Mac, you stay."

"Benny can stay, too. And John." Chris murmurs, just loud enough for Cally to hear. If they're going to have this conversation, Pouliot probably deserves to hear it too, given his status as an unknowing accomplice. And judging from the look on Moore’s face, he's got enough of the puzzle figured out that leaving him to fill in the missing pieces on his own is probably a terrible idea. "Fuck it. Just...shut the door. Everybody who's in, stay." 

Cally shuts the door behind him, and the room goes still.

“So…” Cally prompts, looking from person to person. 

"We were playing poker," Chris begins.

"Yeah," McDonagh chimes in, "Chris has one hell of a poker face. So does Cam."

Chris begins to reconsider his earlier assessment of Ryan's status as an asshole.

"I'm aware," says Cally evenly, meeting McDonagh's eyes. "Are you saying that Chris and Cam's...poker faces...mean you'd rather not play poker with them?"

Cam looks up sharply and Chris has the sudden urge to grab his hand, because they're so far apart in the room and if they're going to do this, if they're going to have this conversation that he doesn't think either of them are ready to have, they should be doing it together. But he doesn't, he stays put. 

"Nope," McDonagh shakes his head. "Not saying that at all. Just saying, if you're gonna have a poker face like that, it's the sort of thing you'd think you'd tell your friends about."

"I'm confused," Derick puts in. "Are we talking about the card game, or are we talking about Chris and Cam having sex?"

A mixture of noises circles the room then - a groan from Cam, a surprised snort of laughter from Pouliot, a sharp intake of breath from Richards. Hagelin and Zuccarello don’t say anything, just exchange glances. 

"Well, really," Derick says, sounding slightly apologetic, "We're all adults here, that's stupid."

Cam lets out his breath in a long _whoosh_ and Chris finally gives in to the instinct to step closer to him. Cam does the same, almost in the same second, and they bump shoulders. It's the slightest contact, but it's comforting. Especially considering the fact that he has no idea what they're supposed to say right now. Everyone's basically figured it out, based on the looks on their faces, some kind of declaration would be stupid.

"Can we go now?" Cam asks quietly. Cally crosses his arms and leans on the wall. Chris hopes that doesn't mean they're gearing up for an hour-long discussion.

"Does anybody have a problem with Cam and Chris?" he asks. It's not a demanding question; honestly, it's not like Cally goes around bossing everybody around off the ice. It's just a genuine query.

Hagelin shakes his head immediately, mirrored by Zuccarello and Pouliot. Richards shrugs. 

"Doesn't seem like it's any of our business," he points out.

"It is _too_ our business," McDonagh protests. "Look, like I said, I don't have a problem with it, it's just not the kind of thing you want to be left in the dark about. What if somebody in the press got wind of it and started coming around and we didn't know what to say? You should've told us."

"What the hell were we supposed to say?!" Cam finally speaks up. "It's not like we've been carrying on for months. It's been a couple weeks, that's all. And..."

"Were we supposed to get matching t-shirts or something and throw a party over a week-old relationship?" Chris throws in, wanting to back Cam up. Technically, it hasn't even been a week, not since they actually talked about stuff, but if they’re talking about the whole duration of him and Cam doing…stuff…well, yeah. “I wouldn’t even introduce a girl to you guys after that long.”

“That’s not a girl!” Brad points out, gesturing at Cam, “That’s Cam!”

“Thanks for noticing,” Cam mutters. 

“No, I mean,” Brad specifies, “McD is right. It’s different if it’s some girl we don’t know or care about until she’s with you.”

“Look,” Chris says, feeling more horrible by the minute because Cam looks like he absolutely wants to sink into the floor and Chris knows he’s blaming himself for _everything_. “We didn’t want to tell you guys because it’s just sort of…we’re just giving it a shot.”

“And it’s hard enough without a bunch of pressure,” Cam adds.

“We’re not pressuring you, though,” John says, finally shrugging on the dry shirt he found. “Nobody’s gonna send you hate mail or anything, no death threats.”

“You guys aren’t, obviously,” Chris concedes. “But other people…and it’s not the hate mail, it’s just…you know, when your friends hook up, you…”

“You root for them,” Cam finishes. “And if Chris and I don’t want to do this anymore, it’s just…it’d be a lot easier if it was just something between the two of us and not a _thing_ with the whole team.”

“No pressure, then,” Zuccarello promises. “Committment is…what’s the word…”

“Overrated,” Hagelin supplies.

“Yeah, overrated. Do what you want to do.”

There’s a murmur of agreement around the room and everyone nods.

“Except,” Richards adds, quickly, “If 'what you want to do' could just…not be…doing it in my bed or anything.”

“Damn it,” Cam mutters under his breath, “That was the next place we were going to try.”

Chris feels blood rush into his face, hot beneath his skin, because the way Cam talks about it, jokes about it so easily…he sounds like it’s just the most natural thing in the world to him, like he and Chris have had sex a hundred times and he’s just going to tease Richie about a hundred and one taking place on top of his pillow. Chris can still count every touch in his mind, he’s still subconsciously keeping a tally of every kiss, every time Cam has had his arms wrapped around him. It’s so new, but for Cam, the fact of it seems to come so easily…

Chris hopes he’ll get there, he genuinely does, and he thinks that probably starts with trusting their teammates to handle this as well as he and Cam need them to. He reaches over the two or three inches between himself and Cam, and twists his fingers around Cam’s.

“So,” he says. “I’m taking my, uh, Cam, and we’re going back to our room, so…” That doesn’t come out nearly as emphatically or eloquently as he was hoping it would.

Cally shrugs.

“Alright, then.”

“Wait,” McDonagh speaks up, “what about everybody else?”

Cam glances at Chris, and Chris looks back at him. 

“Just…you know, don’t be high school about it,” Chris says. “Tell who you need to tell, if you feel like you have to, but just…if it comes to it, if you feel like somebody has a problem, or there’s something you really need to say, say it to one of us, not…I mean, don’t…”

“Don’t go tell some reporter somewhere,” Cam says quietly. Practically everyone in the room looks offended.

“We’re not total assholes,” Hagelin frowns.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Cam corrects hastily, “Just, please, yes, if you have a problem, come talk to us. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise, we’ll fuck off and mind our own business,” Richards agrees easily. “We’re family here, you know.”

And it’s funny, because…Chris has been playing with the Rangers for months now, and there’s absolutely no question that he’s found his place on the ice, that he’s a vital part of the team, but that moment, with his fingers wrapped around Cam’s, when Richie says the word _family_ , is the moment when Chris really, honestly feels like he belongs.


	15. Do Your Thing, Do it Well

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am fully aware that this "chapter" is like 90% porn. Sorry/not sorry. :P The good news is I have a really good idea of where I want to end this (finally) I just really hope the playoffs and stuff cooperate and I don't have to completely bullshit it :P
> 
> Chapter title is from "No Better" - a.k.a. the only Lorde song I can stand which actually lends itself really well to writing feelings!sex.

Cam puts his keycard into the slot on the door, and waits for the light to turn green and the lock to click before he turns the handle and pushes his way inside. Chris, close behind him, hurries in and shuts the door behind them. He stops and puts his fingertips on the closed door. Cam watches him, and thinks that Chris looks like he’s trying to keep the cold out, trying to brace the door against the wind and the ice that’s covered the city. 

He steps up behind Chris and loops his arms around him, pulling at the unzipped halves of his coat. Kreider rolls his shoulders back, letting Cam pull the coat off of him, and drops his arms to his sides. Cam gets the coat down past Chris’s elbows and lets it fall onto the floor, bringing his hands back up to rest them on Kreider’s sides, feeling the warmth of his skin through his shirt. They don’t turn the lights on; there’s enough from the lamps on the balcony outside for their purposes at the moment.

“Well, they know.” Chris says after a minute or two of silence. Cam leans close to one side of him.

“You were perfect,” he whispers, and feels a shudder run through Chris’s body, probably at the hot rush of Cam’s breath on the side of his neck after the chill of the outside air between the hotel rooms. Cam takes a moment, watching Chris’s profile in the yellow light from the walkway outside, the arch of his neck, the dark chaos of his hair, slight curls framing the pale skin of his face. He can see the corner of Chris’s lips closest to him turn up at his words, and it’s a welcome reward even if he wasn’t saying it to make Chris feel good. He was saying it because it’s true, because he can’t imagine how Chris could have handled that situation better. Certainly he handled it better than Cam, who was paralyzed with fear and uncertainty for half of the conversation. 

“I hope so.” Chris turns towards him, and Cam lifts his hands up, takes Chris’s face in both of them and kisses him, soft and long, until Chris reaches up and wraps the fingers of his right hand around Cam’s wrist. “Bed,” Chris murmurs, and Cam nods wordlessly, shrugging out of his own coat and shirt one after the other. In all honesty, the night before, when they slept together in this room, they hadn’t done anything. There was too much to think about, too much pressure they’d put on themselves to do well in the game to really focus on anything else. Tonight, though…

It’s different from the first time, in Pittsburgh. That time it was desperation and the need to vent anger and frustration. Tonight, it’s the leftover elation from the win, it’s relief at the guys’ reactions, it’s the weight that’s been taken off of their shoulders at not having to hide this, at knowing that they stand together and at least half of the team stands behind them.

Chris sheds his shirt as well, taking his time, and Cam sits down on the edge of the bed, reaching forward and wrapping his hands around the backs of Chris’s thighs, pulling him close, looking up at him. Chris climbs onto the bed, pushing Cam backwards and down into the blankets, his knees on either side of him, and looks down at him. It’s strange, the feeling that wraps itself around Cam’s heart from the depth of his chest. He can see Chris’s eyes in the dim lighting, and it feels like the world around him stops. 

Cam lives nearly his whole life in the public eye, he’s used to being watched, used to being scrutinized, but the way Chris looks down at him makes him feel like his entire soul is naked and open to be read. Like Chris sees every single thing Cam is and will ever be, and wants it.

Cam blinks slowly, looks up at Chris through his eyelashes, because his eyes just won’t stay all the way open, maybe because of the intensity of Chris’s gaze, maybe because of the desire that’s got him going hard already even though Chris has hardly touched him. 

Chris lowers his head, noses his way into the crook of Cam’s neck, sucking at the skin there, his tongue leaving hot marks that turn to cold in the air, and Cam hums quietly in satisfaction, his hands still curved around Chris’s legs on either side of him. The noise draws Chris’s focus back to Cam’s mouth, and he kisses him hard, tongue pressing past Cam’s lips insistently as Cam opens his mouth willingly into it. Cam runs his hands up Chris’s thighs, thumbs sliding into the grooves between his legs and his body before he hooks his fingers into the waist of Chris’s pants, pulling them down over his hips, far enough that he can take Chris’s dick in his hand through his boxers. He’s satisfied to find that Chris is also already hard, and thrusts forward into Cam’s hand, humming into Cam’s mouth as his tongue slides past Cam’s teeth.

“Pants,” Cam breathes, giving his hips a little thrust for emphasis. Chris grins and climbs off of him, gesturing down at him like _well, what are you waiting for?_  

“Make me do all the work, as usual,” Cam grumbles, sliding out of his pants, and Chris laughs and pushes his own pants down the rest of the way, barely giving Cam enough time to get rid of his boxers before he’s on top of him again, one leg between Cam’s, his dick pressing hard against Cam’s hip as he leans forward to bite at Cam’s lower lip. He holds himself up with one arm, his other reaching down as his fingers close around Cam’s shaft, not quite tightly enough for Cam’s tastes. Cam reaches down, trying to reciprocate, finding Chris’s boxers still maddeningly present, grasping at his hardness through the cloth.

Chris has his hand wrapped around Cam’s dick and he’s working it just _so_ , exactly the way Cam likes it, and Cam thinks not for the first time that they probably have more things in common than they ever would have expected at the beginning, including the ways they like to be touched.

“Hey,” Cam breathes, and Chris lifts his head, eyebrows raised in question.

“Good?” he asks. Cam nods quickly.

“You should…” He still feels a little strange saying it out loud, but he’s wanted it for days and he has to figure out how to ask for it. “Get the lube.” That’s not exactly what he wants, but it’s getting there anyway. Chris rocks back onto his knees and scrambles off of the bed, digging around in his bag before returning with the bottle. He pours some into his hand and goes back to jerking Cam off, but as good as it feels, Cam reaches down and grabs hold of Chris’s hand, stopping him. Chris looks up, uncertainty in his eyes, and Cam bites down on his own lip, trying to come up with words that won’t sound stupid or cliched.

“I want…” is as far as he gets before Chris slides a finger down, tracing it around Cam’s hole, and Cam loses the ability to speak right along with all the breath that goes out of his lungs in surprise. 

“This?” Chris asks, and Cam manages to force a nod, because then Chris is pressing the tip of his finger inside of him and it’s _good_ and then all of a sudden it’s painful too and Cam winces. Chris doesn’t stop, but he slows down, working his finger inside little by little as Cam adjusts to it. “Alright?” Chris breathes. Cam lets his lower lip slide free of his teeth.

“Yeah. More lube. Go slow.” he says, suddenly wondering if he was gentle enough on Chris in Pittsburgh. Chris had told him not to be, it was almost like he’d enjoyed the pain if there was any, but Cam doesn’t have any such fixation tonight. He has no frustration to vent or a need to make amends for anything either of them did wrong that night. He can feel blood pounding in every inch of his body, like every part of him is ten times as sensitive as it usually is. 

Chris adds more lube and tries again, and this time, Cam manages to relax and it still burns but it's better. Kreider's eyes are on him, he can feel it even though his own are half closed, and he nods. 

"Good," he murmurs, and Chris slides his finger out and back in, and Cam has his whole attention on not clenching around the finger inside of him. They don't say anything for a few minutes as Chris focuses on loosening Cam up. Cam has his doubts, suddenly, whether this is actually going to work, and he feels guilty, keeping Chris waiting when he can see the evidence of exactly how aroused he is right there in front of him. 

"It's alright," Chris says, like he knows exactly what Cam is thinking. "Take your time. I can wait." And that, that's better than anything else Chris could have said. Because Cam can see that Chris wants him, but he wants him enough, cares enough to wait, to do this right. By the time Chris slides a third finger into him a few moments later, Cam's breathing has gone shallow and quick, his chest rising and falling at a much faster rate than it usually does. It’s taking everything he has to stay focused. 

“Go ahead,” he breathes, and Chris pulls his fingers out slowly. Cam can see the swell of his throat as he swallows, and he realizes, watching that little gulp that Chris is nervous, too. Somehow, that’s reassuring. There’s so much power in him, so much potential to dominate and control, but Chris is gentle now, perfectly in tune with his own strength and how he can use it.

“Condoms?” Chris asks, and Cam waves towards his bag. Chris moves away for a few seconds, and returns, standing by the side of the bed, having lost his boxers somewhere along the way, stroking himself with one hand, holding the condom in the other. Cam puts a hand over his eyes, pressing the pads of his thumb and index fingers down against his eyelids, because fuck if that isn’t the hottest thing he’s ever seen and he’s just about sure that if he keeps watching, he’s going to come right then. 

He hears the condom wrapper tear, hears Chris moving around. Then he feels the bed move under Chris’s weight, and Kreider’s back over him, looking down at him once Cam puts his hand down and opens his eyes. 

“We don’t have to do this.” Chris says, Cam shakes his head vehemently.

“Want to.”

Chris leans forward, and positions himself carefully, his eyes locked onto Cam’s face as he presses inside of him. He goes slowly, and Cam tries to relax, but there’s so much, and he must make some kind of noise of discomfort, because Chris stops.

“Sorry,” he whispers, and Cam shakes his head insistently.

“I can take it.”

“Do you want to do it…the other way, like, do you want to turn over?”

Cam wants to say yes, because everything he’s read says that’ll probably hurt less. But even more than that, he wants to see Chris’s face. The thought of watching Chris’s expression as he comes while he’s fucking Cam…that’s enough to convince Cam that staying exactly like they are is the best idea _ever,_ and he shakes his head.

“No,” he says, “I wanna see you.”

Chris laughs at him, but he pushes a little further in at the same time, and finally, _finally_ , he's fully inside of Cam, and Cam sees stars from how hard he's squeezing his eyes closed. 

"Fuck," he murmurs, and Chris grins wickedly. 

"Yeah, you just tell me when." He rocks his hips slightly, and Cam feels something inside of himself, an undeniable twinge of pleasure in the midst of the discomfort.

"Do that again," he pleads. Chris repeats the motion, and Cam arches up slightly to meet him this time, and the third time, Chris slides out and back in and Cam lets out a surprised half-moan, half-gasp. 

"Good, yeah," he says, his voice much steadier, and Chris finds a rhythm, slow at first, then increasing the pace. Cam reaches up, his arms wrapping around Chris's back, fingertips digging in, tracing the valleys and peaks of his backbone, feeling the flex and pull of each thrust through the smooth skin.

Chris's mouth is open, and his breath is rough and uneven as it catches in his chest every time he thrusts inside of Cam. Watching him, Cam almost forgets how to breathe himself, he's so fixated on Chris's face. Chris grabs at his hips with large hands, pulling Cam into him, lifting his legs to get more leverage or maybe just because he likes the way Cam's eyes widen when Chris moves that much deeper into him at the new angle. 

Chris is fucking beautiful, Cam thinks, although hell if he's going to tell him that. But god, the way his hair clings to the edges of his face, damp with sweat, the way he flexes, the way his whole body shifts beneath his skin every time he moves, the dark pleasure in his eyes when he opens them, the shine of his lips after he darts his tongue out across them, sucking in ragged breath after breath of air. Raw power and energy and strength concentrated into just this, into their two bodies. Cam is making sounds now that he's not even conscious of making, soft pants and gasps and moans breathed into the air between them. 

Cam hasn't done this with Chris enough times to really feel like he can absolutely tell when Chris is about to come, but he has a feeling when Chris's eyes go totally shut and the thrusts are uneven and desperate, that he can't be far off. His hands grip Cam's hips, probably not hard enough to leave bruises, and Cam finds himself wishing that they would, that Chris would leave some kind of mark that he was here, that they did this, that he claimed every part of Cam with his hands and eyes and lips. 

The thought of Chris's fingerprints bruised onto his body, of real tangible evidence that he can look back on the next day is almost too much for him. He can feel himself clench around Chris and he's not even sure if he does it intentionally or if it's just something his body is just deciding to do on its own because every touch and movement here feels natural, like instinct, like he was made for it. 

Chris gasps and goes stiff, thrusting two more times, his shoulders taut and drawn, and his head falls forward onto his chest, one hand releasing Cam's hip to grab at Cam's erection, moaning breathelessly as he comes. The combination of the pressure of Chris's hand wrapped around him and the final shock of pleasure inside of him as Chris fucks into him in the wake of his own orgasm, pushes Cam over the edge and he comes on Chris's hand and his own stomach and probably Chris's chest, too.

Cam groans as Chris buries his head in his shoulder, breathing hot and fast against Cam’s skin as they gasp for the same air, and for a few minutes, they lie there.

“Holy fuck,” is the first thing Chris says when he’s recovered his breath, and Cam laughs exhaustedly as Chris rolls off of him onto the bed, grabbing for the box of tissues on the nightstand.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Yeah, me too.”

He waits as Chris pulls roughly half the tissues out of the box, and shudders, his skin sensitive as Chris cleans them both up before standing up to throw away the condom. After he comes back, Cam pulls the blankets up around both of them and gathers Chris into his arms.

 

 

When Cam wakes up in the morning, his left hand is asleep, and he realizes that’s because it’s underneath Chris. He leans forward and presses a silent kiss to Chris’s shoulder blade as he extracts his arm. Neither of their alarms have gone off yet, and Chris makes a quiet moan of protest in his sleep before burrowing his head back into the pillow. Cam flexes his fingers as the tingle of blood rushing back in spreads up his arm, and rubs his head with his other hand, keeping his eyes shut. Usually, once he’s up, he’s up, and there’s no going back, but he enjoys the moment or two of quiet before he reaches over to the nightstand and grabs his phone.

It’s been in silent mode all night, but there are two text messages waiting on the screen. The first is from Hank, and he taps it. 

_Heard the “news” - Congratulations._

Cam snorts quietly, because, really, Hank couldn't wait until morning to say “I told you so” in his own peculiar little “news”-in-quote-marks kind of way? But he appreciates it, so he just sends back one of those thumbs-up icons and resolves to discuss it with Hank later in person. He almost feels bad that Lundqvist wasn’t there for the conversation the night before, but then, Hank probably still knows as much or more than any of the guys who _were_ there. Still, Cam thinks he would have paid money to have seen the look on Hank's face when whichever one of the guys told him, whether he pretended to be surprised or just gave them a wise, knowing nod.

The other text message is from a number he doesn’t have saved in his phone. It’s a 312 area code, and Cam frowns and opens it, suspecting that it’s just a coupon or spam from some mailing list he accidentally added his phone number to. 

_Decide right now if he’s worth it._

Cam sits up uneasily, staring down at the message. What the hell is that supposed to mean? He can come up with a hundred different potential meanings, most of them centered around himself and Kreider, around what, exactly, it is that Kreider is supposed to be worth according to the anonymous message. He wants to reply back and demand to know who’s texting him, but he’s also just curious. It’s not one of the guys, because he has all of their numbers. He finally texts back _Worth what?_ and puts his phone back on the nightstand before rolling back over to try to catch a few more minutes of sleep before they have to get up.

Just before they get onto the plane later that morning, a second message comes through. It's one word.

_Everything._

Cam frowns and sends another text back.

_Who is this?_ he asks finally, and sees the reply being typed almost immediately.

_Somebody who knows this shit way too well._

Well, that narrows it down like, not at all. Cam is irritated at someone shoving their nose into his and Chris's business, but he's also curious, and he'd be lying if he said he hadn't wished for somebody outside of the situation to talk to about all of this. Hank is helpful, but Hank is also invested in the situation, and if whoever's texting Cam is objective about this...well, that he doesn't know yet.

_Trying to scare me off?_

_No. But think about what you're getting into._

Cam makes up his mind that he's going to call the number when he gets home, figure out who's on the other end, but he doesn't have time then because they're about to get onto the plane and obviously he can't have a conversation a mile up in the air with some random anonymous person while everyone else listens. 

 

 

 

It would be nice to say that things don’t change between them and the team, but it would also be completely inaccurate, Cam knows. It isn’t that the guys are treating them badly, no one makes any comments that could be construed any way other than politely, but there’s definitely something different. There are eyes on them. Cam can feel it sometimes, even when he’s just sitting in front of his stall doing nothing of interest, he can feel that he’s being watched, and he’ll look up and find one of the guys just looking away, embarrassed.

It's alright, though, because they play alright anyway - Chris especially, and there's certainly nothing in their game that shows that anything's changed.

The next week flies by, probably because they’re at home for four games and because Cam doesn’t start any of them. Probably. Possibly also because the beginning of a relationship is always a whirlwind of emotion and giddy excitement. 

They beat Dallas, and Cam makes Chris come with his fingers on his own kitchen table ten minutes after they make it through the door.

They beat Philly. Chris bends Cam over the back of his couch and takes him there, and Cam’s hips are marked for three days from the frame of the couch digging into his body as Chris pins him against it. Cam gets hard when he notices the bruises on his skin in the showers.

Tampa is a struggle for them in the midst of what appears to be a streak of brilliance, but they still don’t even make it out of the elevator before Chris’s hand is in Cam’s hair, fingers grasping at it, his mouth on Cam’s and his other hand kneading Cam’s ass like he can’t touch enough of him.

And by the time they wrap up their homestand with a victory against the Red Wings, the only real question they even ask anymore is whose place they’re going home to.

It’s not until Ottawa, when Cam’s poking through his phone late on Friday night…well, early Saturday morning, by that point, kept awake by what he’s insisting to himself is most definitely nerves over the game against the Senators the next day (and definitely not the fact that he and Chris have been asked to respect their room assignments) that he remembers the texts. He frowns, and thinks back on the past few days, and rather smugly sends off a reply to the last text he got over a week earlier. 

_I think I like what I’ve gotten myself into._


	16. I Know It's a Lie, I Want It to Be True

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry.
> 
> Chapter title from "Collect Call" by Metric.
> 
> Ah yes, also, if you didn't watch the Ottawa game, and have somehow missed the commentary on tumblr, there's a comment at the end that goes something like "and he gets a kiss on the helmet from Kiss..., er, Chris...Kiss Kreider."

Chris comes out of the showers after the game (which went pretty damned well - they took the Senators 4-1), rubbing his hair with a towel vigorously, and is getting together his stuff when Nash whistles quietly. Chris jerks his head up quickly, shooting a glance in his direction, but Nash is looking down at his phone.

“You guys made the news,” he says, and Chris frowns.

“Which guys?” he asks, because it wouldn’t make sense for Nash to refer to the whole team like he’s not part of it or something.

“You two,” Nash points at Chris and Cam at the same time, splitting the middle and index fingers of his right hand into a V.

“What do you mean?” Cam asks, buttoning his pants. He still doesn’t have a shirt on, but Chris has quickly managed to get _not staring at Cam’s body in the locker room_ down to an art.

Nash holds his phone out, and he's got a video pulled up of the end of the game. He taps his ear, like _listen_ and Chris holds the tiny speaker up to his ear just in time to hear a remark about what's just become his ordinary post-victory ritual with Cam.

" _Kiss_ Kreider?" he blurts. "C'mon..." He can't help but laugh, but Cam takes the phone, rewinds the video, and listens, too, frowning. 

"Unprofessional." Cam comments, then hands Rick's phone back to him. Chris's laughter dies down, and at first, he's not quite sure whether Cam is serious or not, but it's hard to tell because Cam's gone back to looking at his own phone, which, come to think of it, he’s been on quite a lot that day, almost constantly when they haven’t been on the ice. He’s texting, and isn't even noticing Chris's questioning glances. 

It’s a good moment, though, because it sort of…breaks the ice. The other guys give him shit about it, and refer to him as “Kiss” for a while, but it’s all good-natured teasing, nothing hurtful or anything that makes Chris feel uncomfortable or marginalized. Alright, maybe he’s a little uncomfortable when Carcillo gives him an exaggerated wink and makes a comment about how Chris just might score tonight after all, but that’s just because he’s embarrassed. He gives Carcillo a well-deserved glare, but the only thing he gets in response is a wide grin. And he realizes that this is a good thing, the guys being ready to give him and Cam shit about the thing between them. This means they’re comfortable with it, they’re at ease enough with the relationship to feel like it’s just another thing that they can rib each other about. In the matter of a couple of weeks, Chris and Cam have become a fact of life.

 

 

They beat Washington at home the next day, with the same score they pulled against Ottawa, 4-1. Hank is in goal, though, which means Chris doesn’t have to worry about putting up with any comments in the locker room afterward because there are no kisses for anyone to comment on. 

He also discovers that he looks forward to game nights when Cam doesn’t play. By the time they get home, Cam is always buzzing with unspent excitement and energy, almost too much for Chris sometimes, but it’s a welcome imbalance because Cam usually takes over, does something unexpected like fucking Chris on the kitchen table or up against a wall or something, which are all things Chris is more than okay with. 

Tonight, though, Cam is distracted the whole way back to his apartment, looking down at his phone, and Chris decides that maybe he’s just worn out. They did have back to back games (even if Cam didn’t play in one of them) and that _did_ mean trekking all the way to Canada and back in the space of 48 hours. And while that’s something that they honestly do all the time, it does start to wear a person down after a while, Chris reasons.

“You alright?” Chris asks, and Cam tucks his phone away quickly. 

“Yeah, yeah. Just…you know, worn out.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Chris agrees easily. He decides that hey, if he needs to, he can do without the being fucked up against a wall - they’ve been going at it like crazy for nearly two weeks and that’s in addition to playing hockey games, so he figures they’ll hit a wall at some point and have to take a break. Maybe this is it. 

They step inside of the apartment a short while later, and Chris feels the sudden need to let Cam know that it’s really alright if all they do is go straight to sleep, or sit around and watch a movie, whatever.

“Hey, you wanna order some food or something?”

He leans in to kiss the side of Cam's neck, but Cam stiffens against him, his shoulders drawn and guarded. Frowning, Chris reaches down, wraps an arm around Cam's waist.

"What's up?"

"I can't...We can't."

Chris feels his throat close up, sudden dread crawling up his spine as Cam turns around to face him.

"It's cool," he says, laughing, trying to take a little of the gravity out of the room. ”I got more lube. It's in the bathroom." Somewhere in his heart, he knows that isn't going to fix the situation, whatever the situation is. Cam shakes his head, confirming that suspicion.

"We can't be, um, we can't, you and me, we have to quit doing this."

"Doing what?"

"Fucking around."

It sounds so dumb, because Cam's making it sound like they're both just killing time and they both know that's not true. At least, Chris knows. They've talked about this. He swallows hard.

"We're aren’t fucking around, we’re...you and me.”

"We have to stop, though."

"I don't want to," Chris blurts, putting his hands up to rake them through his hair desperately.

"I know, but this is just going to end up badly and you need to focus on playing and so do I."

Why is he saying this now? They've been fine for the last couple of weeks, they’ve been _more_ than fine, they’ve been great, they’ve been spectacular, and now just out of the blue, Cam is dumping him? He stares at Cam, tries to meet his eyes, but Cam looks away, avoiding him.

"No," Chris says, shaking his head. “We’re playing fine. You’re being stupid."

" _This_ is stupid!" Cam says. "You and me, carrying on like we're teenagers, like we don't know what consequences are! And it has to stop!”

Chris chews on his lip hard, and struggles for words because he’s been so blindsided by this that he feels like he just got hit by a bus when he wasn’t even aware that he was anywhere near a road.

"But I love you." he says quietly. He immediately wishes he hadn't. Hadn't wasted that on a situation like this, because he wanted to save it for something really meaningful, a good moment, when he’s sure he means it. He knows he means it now. But Cam rubs at the bridge of his nose with both hands, and Chris can hear the uneven edge of his breath as he exhales.

"That's why we have to stop," he says. 

Begging isn’t becoming of a grown man, but Chris wants nothing more than to grab Cam by the shoulders, shake him, and say _please, please, not now, not when we’ve come this far, give me a chance, I’ll make this work._

“Don’t do this,” he hears himself say, from some distant place that doesn’t even feel like his own body. “Cam, please. Don't do this now. Why?”

Cam is looking down at the floor, and Chris can’t read his expression. That hurts, almost as much as this whole conversation, because usually these days, Chris knows exactly what Cam’s thinking.

"Listen, Chris, I don't know about you, but I don't want to be the poster child for teammates fucking in the NHL. That's what's going to happen, you know that. Either we keep this a secret forever, or we come out with it and face the consequences."

"So we face the consequences. Cam, this isn't the fucking sixties, people don't _care._ "

"Of course they care. If they don't object to it, they're on a crusade for it, and I don't want the whole of my life to be overshadowed by the fact that I'm in lo...a thing with another guy. Somebody has to fight that fight, Chris, but not you, and not me. That's not what I want. I want you, but I don't want that."

"God, Cam, are you listening to yourself? Do you think that's why people...why they stand up for stuff like this, because they want to be remembered as crusaders? _Nobody_ fucking wants that! Everybody wants to love who they want to love and do what the fuck they want and be left alone about it but for that to happen, somebody has to stand up for it sooner or later, and-"

“You have to think about your career, Chris. You've got way too much talent for people to remember you as the guy that fucked his goalie.”

“I’d think that would be my own damned decision,” Chris says, fiercely, and Cam looks up at him. His voice is angry, but there’s nothing in his eyes but dark sadness.

“Fine. Then I have to think about _my_ career. We have to stop.”

Chris struggles with that for a moment, with the anger and hurt and betrayal welling up inside of him until finally it all comes out. Chris has never regretted anything more than he regrets the words he says next.

“Your career? As what, a guy who spends the rest of his time in the NHL playing backup?”

Cam is at least six feet away, but he looks for all the world like Chris slapped him across the face. He bites down on his bottom lip, so hard that Chris can see the white imprints spreading out from where his teeth press into the skin. 

“I think you should go now,” he says quietly, and then, when Chris doesn't move, adds, "Get out."

Chris stares him down for a few seconds, then steps to the door, jerking it open and stepping out into the hall. He looks back over his shoulder, fingers wrapped around the door handle. 

"Fuck you," he says. "Fuck you for making me question...fuck, _everything_ , and fuck you for dragging me into this and leaving me hanging."

He jerks the door shut behind him, strides down the hall and makes it into the elevator before the weight of it hits him.

Then he slides down the wall inside of the elevator, his feelings and his whole being much too large in the confines of a world that feels like it's shrinking by the minute, and he has to make himself smaller, head in his hands against the cold paneling. It feels like he should cry, like this should be a breaking point, but the pain is a white hot dry agony that has no way of escaping. It's trapped inside of him, burning his heart past the point of recognition. 

_Stupid, stupid, stupid._

He had been right to be scared all along. 

_Stupid, stupid._

It's not even like he didn't see this coming weeks ago. Not like he didn't try to avoid it. 

_Stupid_. 

For letting this happen, for letting Cam into his head and his bed and his heart. For imagining that this was going to end up any way but disastrously. 

He doesn't know how long he's been sitting on the floor in the elevator before it starts to move and he realizes that he never pressed a button. He forces himself to stand up before the elevator reaches the ground floor, and walks out through the doors numbly, to the street, where he stands, the air cold on his skin. It should give him clarity, but it doesn’t. Should snap him out of it, but it doesn’t come close. Because Cam suddenly doesn’t want him, and Chris’s self-esteem isn’t so shitty that that’s nearly enough to make him feel worthless, but it’s not fucking _fair_ or right or anything. 

He’s finally got his shit together. He knows what he wants, and what he wants is Cam Talbot. And Cam doesn’t want him, doesn’t want to fuck him or touch him or any of the other things they’ve been doing so enthusiastically for the past two weeks. And maybe that’s not quite fair because Cam said he _did_ want those things but apparently they’re not worth it to him. Not worth fighting for, not worth standing up for. That’s what really fucking hurts. Not Cam kicking him out of his apartment, which, honestly, he probably deserved, or really even the breaking up itself, but the thought that Cam does want him a little, just not enough to fight for it.

Chris wanders until he comes to a main road with a lot of traffic, and he doesn’t even know where he is at that point and he doesn’t quite have the concentration to figure it out even though it probably wouldn’t be that hard. So he gets a cab, and he climbs into the back and stares out the window dejectedly until the driver clears his throat.

“Address?” he asks, and Chris realizes that he hasn’t actually said where he wants to go. He thinks about it for a minute, then gives the driver Cally’s address, not his own, because he doesn’t think he can face being in his empty condo right now. 

They’re almost there when it occurs to him that it’s nearly two in the morning. He’s ready to just tell the driver to turn back around and take him home, but when they pull up in front of Cally’s house, there’s a light on. Still unsure, Chris pays the cab fare, climbs out and walks up to the door. He hears the cab drive away behind him, and distantly realizes that he forgot to ask the driver to stick around, which probably would have been a good idea.

He knocks on the door, hoping silently that he’s not waking Cally’s whole family up. 

It’s Cally who answers the door, and he’s holding Charlotte on his hip. They both look way too alert for Chris to have woken them up just then, but he still stands uncertainly until Cally breaks the silence.

“Kreids, what’s up?” That’s Cally’s tactful way of saying _why the hell are you at my house at two in the morning_.

“I, um…” Chris begins, but just then, Kyla appears behind Cally. She takes one look at Chris, then nudges Cally aside and grabs Chris’s arm, hauling him into the house.

Five minutes later, Chris finds himself sitting at the table in Cally’s kitchen, looking down at a cup of hot chocolate that he didn’t know he wanted. Charlotte is sitting on the table across from him, eying the marshmallows that are floating in his cup, and she makes futile attempts to crawl over and grab them, held back by her father.

“No, no, miss sniffles, no sugar for you,” Cally says, holding her tight. “Chris, what the-“ He covers up Charlotte’s ears. “What the hell happened? You look like shit.”

Kyla prods at his arm and gives him a _look_. Chris knows he’s right, though; he’s been wandering around in remarkably shitty weather on top of getting dumped, so there’s no way he looks as good as he should considering the way the game ended up.

“Cam, uh…” he starts, but he doesn’t know how to finish it. _Cam dumped me_ sounds so pathetic. “We…” He doesn’t even know if Cally’s talked to his wife about this, but he can’t imagine that he hasn’t, that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re married, right? Talk about everything? Either way, it just doesn’t matter anymore. “We broke up.”

Cally sighs and pushes a strand of Charlotte’s hair out of her face as she tries to wriggle free of his arms.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks. 

“I’m pretty sure that’s why he’s here, Ry.” Kyla points out, and Cally sticks his tongue out at her. Chris looks away, because they’re…they’re so happy together and he’s so…not, as of like an hour ago.

“He might not, maybe he just wants…okay, yeah, what do you want, Kreids?”

Chris isn’t sure. He’s not sure he can talk about it yet without breaking down embarrassingly and hell if he’s gonna do that in front of his captain and his wife, so no. But he can’t just sit there, and…

“I just didn’t want to go home,” he says, finally. 

“Did something happen?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, you guys seemed cool after the game, what changed?”

Chris shrugs helplessly.

“I don’t even know, that’s the sh-uh, worst part,” he says, glancing at Charlotte as he avoids swearing. “I’ve been trying to figure it out and I can’t, I can’t think of anything except he’s seemed distracted lately and he’s always on his-Oh.” Right there, halfway through that sentence, is when he thinks he puts the pieces together. “Oh, god, I’m an idiot.” He puts his head into his hands.

“What?” Kyla asks.

“He’s always on his phone. He met a girl. That’s got to be it, he met a girl.” 

“Is that what he told you?” Cally wonders.

“No. He said all this stuff about not wanting to be the “posterchild of teammates fucking.” Ugh, sorry, Charlotte.”

“Why would you think he meant anything else, then?” Cally questions.

“Because…god, I am such an idiot. He’s been all weird about his phone for like a week now and that…it just makes sense.”

“You don’t think he’d just tell you if he met somebody?”

“I don’t know,” Chris takes a sip of his hot chocolate, which is beginning to cool off. “I thought I knew him, up until an hour ago. Now I don’t even…” He shakes his head, and watches Charlotte, who’s stopped wriggling around and has buried her head in her father’s shoulder, finally settling down.

“You gonna be okay?” Cally asks. Chris sets his chin defiantly.

“Yeah. You know what. Yeah. Fuck him. If he can’t tell me the truth, I’m…I’m fine. I’m done.”

“Alright,” Cally says, “Look, do you wanna crash on the couch? I gotta put Char to bed, since she finally seems to be interested in sleeping, but I’ll grab you some blankets.”

Chris thinks about it for a split second, then nods. He doesn’t want to have to call a cab, and he also doesn’t want to be alone. He finishes off his hot chocolate and stands up as Cally heads down the hall. Kyla holds out a hand for the cup, and Chris gives it to her.

“Sorry for…this…” he says, quietly, and she shakes her head. 

“Don’t worry about it. You’re family.” 

Chris wonders if everyone will think so once they find out. Oh, god, everyone has to find out. He suddenly remembers exactly why he and Cam didn’t want everyone to know about this to begin with. He retreats to the couch miserably, and sits there glaring at the coffee table until Cally comes in with blankets.

“If you get cold, there’s more in the closet in the hall, grab what you need.” Cally says, setting the stack of blankets down on the couch next to him. “Chris, look, I’ll talk to Cam. I know I said this was between the two of you, but if he’s being an idiot, I’ll see if I can figure out why.”

Chris wants to say “no thanks,” wants to insist that he can take care of this just fine on his own, but he finds himself nodding slowly instead. He needs closure, he needs to know why Cam changed his mind so suddenly, how they went from blissfully happy together to totally separate in the space of twenty-four hours. And he knows Cam isn’t going to tell _him,_ so if Cally can get it out of him…

“Thanks,” he says quietly, grabbing at the blankets and unfolding them stiffly. “I hope Charlotte feels better.”

“She’ll be fine, it’s just a little cold,” Cally assures him. “Get some sleep.”

Chris tries, but he doesn’t fall asleep until at least three hours later, when physical and emotional exhaustion set in, and when he does, he has dreams he tries to forget.


	17. If the Fire's Out, Baby...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS title is also from Collect Call by Metric. 
> 
> also this is becoming very painful for me to write in a sort of distant abstract way because I love these boys so much and honestly I would be writing happy reunions right now but for that pesky concept of you know...being realistic :P

There is a space of a few seconds the next morning when Cam wakes up, in which he hasn't remembered what happened the night before, and he reaches across the bed to throw an arm over Chris's shoulders. The cold emptiness of that side of the bed brings him out of his half-awake daze, and quickly replaces it with a feeling of sinking sadness. 

It was necessary, Cam tells himself. He had to do it, before things got too complicated. Before they were both in too deep for either of them to make this decision. 

So why does it hurt so fucking much? Why does he feel like the shittiest person in the world? Why can't he stop thinking about Chris's face, the way he said _I love you_ like Cam beat it out of him with his fists?

He pulls the spare pillow over his head, buries his face in it, and immediately realizes that was probably the worst thing he could have done because obviously it smells like Chris, and Cam wants to crawl under his bed and try to wish himself into another life where he never met Chris Kreider or at least never missed him this badly. It suddenly occurs to him that if he's going to do this, for the both of them, if he's going to flip the off switch in order to save them both their privacy and the way they live their lives, he's going to have to do a lot of pretending. In the world of dating and romance, the person who does the dumping doesn't ever get much sympathy, no matter how much they might miss the person they dumped, no matter how much it hurts them, because, Cam knows, everyone just assumes that if they wanted the relationship they would have kept it. You don't really get to mope around and pine over a relationship that you yourself put an end to.

Cam rolls over and grabs his phone from beside the bed and unlocks it. He checks his email, his various sports news sites, and a few things he doesn't even normally check, just to occupy his mind. Then he flips over to his text messages. Despite knowing that Chris hasn't texted him, there is still disappointment in his heart when he confirms that fact. He scrolls down the list, then taps on the conversation with the person he hasn't even added to his contacts (due to not having a name to associate with the number and all). 

_Called it quits._ He sends the text and swallows hard. Somehow, putting it down in writing makes it seem very real and final. 

The reply doesn't come until after he's out of the shower a half hour later and has started fixing himself a bowl of cereal. He's just pouring the milk when his phone hums on the counter, and he grabs it with his free hand. The reply is not at all what he expects to read.

_Shit. Why?_

Cam frowns and sets the jug of milk down to type.

_What do you mean why, aren't you the one who's been telling me to do this all along?_

_Fuck, no, man. I was trying to warn you, not scare you off._

Well, you did, Cam thinks. You did. 

He doesn’t text back because he just doesn't think he has it in him to listen to the person who opened his eyes try to talk him into closing them again. 

 

It's good to go a day without having to see anyone, even if it leaves Cam alone with his own thoughts, which are considerably less than friendly towards him. He goes for a run, but with the weather, it doesn't last long because it's just too damned cold to breathe. 

He's back at home, sitting on his couch, flipping through channels on the TV, when he remembers that he and Chris had planned to spend their Monday off having a marathon of some stupid TV show. They hadn't even settled on a show yet, but Cam suddenly finds that he really doesn't want to watch anything anymore, and he turns the TV off, throwing the remote down on the couch beside him. He leans forward and buries his head in his hands, and wonders how long it's going to take for him to stop hating himself. Probably, he thinks, about as long as it takes him to stop loving Chris.

He texts Hank, because he's feeling particularly resentful towards his anonymous texter and doesn't feel like baring his soul to a stranger. It's just a quick _you busy?_ text, but Hank takes a few minutes to text him back.

_Feeling a little under the weather. You?_

Cam sighs. 

_Just sitting around,_ he starts typing, but it's not what he really wants to say, and he doesn't want to bother Hank if he's feeling sick. He deletes his reply and leaves Lundqvist's last message unanswered. 

It doesn't occur to Cam until morning skate the next day that Hank feeling "under the weather" equals Cam starting a game he didn't count on starting.  

When the Rangers go up by two in the second and one of their three goals is Chris's, Cam tries his hardest not to let in the thoughts of _thank god we're playing well at least._ But those thoughts sneak in anyway, because his greatest worry over the last 48 hours has been that breaking things off will completely fuck up their game. 

After the Islanders score three unanswered goals in a row and Cam gets pulled to put the extra man on the ice, he can't help feeling like his fears have been completely justified. The only positive thing he can find to focus on as they trudge into the locker room is that at least Chris managed to pull off three points in the game, even if Cam fucked up royally. 

He tries to focus on all the post-game talk, the discussions, tries to focus on something, but he goes through the motions robotically, willing time to pass quicker so he can go home and try to...anything. 

He waits until the room empties out, waits until he sees Chris leave in particular, before he starts shoving the few things he wants to take home into his bag. He pulls a little too hard on a strap, and essentially everything he'd tucked away tumbles out onto the floor. 

Cam lets out a noise of exasperation and sits down, pulling the mess back into order. He's managed to get almost all of it back where it belongs when he hears someone clear their throat behind him. He cranes his neck to look over his shoulder, caught a little off-guard since he thought he was in the room alone.

It's Cally, looking like he's just about ready to leave - he's got his coat on and all, but he doesn't head for the door. Instead, he comes over to Cam. He leans on the wall next to Cam's stall and crosses his arms, but he doesn't say anything until Cam looks up at him.

"What!?" Cam demands, frustration obvious in his voice. Cally gives him a _you know perfectly well what_ kind of face, and Cam throws his glove into the wrong place, not even caring. "Look. I don't want to hear this right now. That game was awful, I feel like shit, and I'm already going home alone, so if you can save it, I'd really appreciate it."

Cally endures that outburst passively, waiting for Cam to finish before he clears his throat.

"Chris thinks you left him for a girl," he says, and it takes Cam a few seconds to process that.

"Wh-...why would he think that?"

"You tell me."

"I don't know. There's no girl. Or guy, either," he adds, hastily.

"That's what Chris thinks." Cally reiterates, and Cam shrugs helplessly.

"Chris is just _fine_." he says, stubbornly. "The way tonight went, I think it'd be obvious that out of the two of us, Chris is probably handling this a little better." He doesn't even bother pretending that Cally doesn't know yet, and he doesn't ask about it, he just assumes that Chris probably went and told him by now. That's what Chris has been doing all along, right? Telling Cally everything, even when it wasn't anything.

"You think the tally of how badly you fuck someone up is measured by whether or not they can still do their job?" Cally sits down a few feet away and Cam has the sinking feeling that he's planning to stay a while. 

"If you fuck up bad enough," Cam mutters.

"Is that what you're going for? You want to fuck him up so bad he can't play anymore?"

"No! That's...that's the exact opposite of what I want. That's what I'm trying not to do. I'm trying to help him here."

Cally looks unimpressed.

“Good job,” he comments. “Listen, Cam, I’m not gonna try to tell you what relationships you should have in your life or who to break up with or not break up with, but you have to be honest with him.”

“I was honest with him,” Cam says (honestly). “It’s not my fault he didn’t believe me.”

Cally doesn’t have much to offer in argument to that (because it’s true, Cam thinks). 

“Why are you suddenly so interested in me and Chris, anyway? Didn’t you like…say it was all our business to take care of?”

“Yeah, I said that. But I also said that I had to make it my business if it started affecting the team.”

“It won’t,” Cam promises.

“Seems to me it just did.” 

“We lost because I had a bad night. Shit happens. Not because Chris and I broke up. Just because shit happens.”

Cally ducks his head in a quick nod. 

“All I’m trying to say is that I think you should try to clear the air. Don’t let this turn into some standoff that ruins your communication.” 

Cam’s not sure whether Cally’s referring to their communication on or off the ice, but he figures it’s probably both. 

"You want to talk about it?" he asks, and Cam shakes his head emphatically.

"Thanks, no thanks," he asserts. "And I doubt you wanna hear it, either."

Cally shrugs.

"Figured since I already heard one side of the story I'd come get the other."

That catches Cam's attention, because he's definitely curious what Chris said.

"Why don't you tell me the side of the story you heard, and I'll tell you mine?"

Callahan looks like he's considering that, but he taps his fingers on his denim-clad knees thoughtfully for a minute or two before he actually says anything.

"Chris showed up at my house Sunday night," he says. "and said you guys broke up. Didn't sound like it was his idea, either."

"It wasn't," Cam confirms, his voice low.

"And then he started talking and I honestly couldn't keep track of it all because he was pretty messed up, but he's got the idea that you broke up with him because you found a girl somewhere."

Cam's breath comes out in a short, frustrated puff.

"That's not true. There's no one else."

"So give me your side."

Cam tries to think of a way to sum up the most emotionally baffling...what, two months of his life. 

"The whole thing from the beginning?"

"You can spare me the details," Cally chuckles.

"You know most of it, anyway," Cam points out. "I mean, I guess it started that night we lost to the Jets?"

"Woah, woah," Cally holds a hand up, "I got a wife and kid at home who probably want to see me before the summer. You can just skip to this weekend."

"Oh," Cam flushes, and as soon as he says it he's not really sure why he thought Cally wanted to hear the whole saga of _Chris and Cam's Ill-Fated Romance and the Fallout Thereof._ "I mean, I got this thought in my head, I started thinking-" He pauses, because he's suddenly not sure why he's talking to Cally about this, why it's anyone's business but his own. He's also not sure whether he really wants to tell Cally about his anonymous texting guy, because...well, because it sounds really fucking stupid to have ended a relationship based on the advice of someone whose name he doesn't even know. 

"I just honestly thought that Chris deserves more than to have his entire career overshadowed by his relationship with me," he explains. "I mean, me...I can live with it. I'm never gonna be Hank. I'm gonna play my hardest and I'm going to win games and stop pucks but I'd be okay with my real imprint on the NHL being...a statement or something. Chris, though..." He lets out a long breath. "Chris is gonna be phenomenal. He doesn't need that."

Cally's shaking his head, and Cam already feels like he doesn't understand at all.

"You can't make decisions like that for other people, Cam," he says, "You made up your mind, you already decided that you're fine with people knowing, but you're not going to give Chris the same chance?"

Cam stands up, pulling his coat on, grabbing his bag as he decides that he's done with this conversation.

"Twenty-two-year-olds aren't really known for their stellar decision-making skills." 

Cally makes a _pssh_ noise.

"He's a grown ass man, Cam. He's young, but he's not fifteen. He's gotten himself this far."

"That's not what I mean," Cam says, but really, it is. 

"You gotta have a little more faith in him," Cally insists.

"I don't have to do anything," Cam says stubbornly. He's honestly not trying to piss Cally off, but he's realized that he doesn't want to talk about this at _all_ anymore. Cally shrugs and puts his hands up.

"That's true enough. I'm just telling it like it seems to me."

Cam looks at the floor because he doesn't have anything to say to that. _Thanks for the input_ just sounds sarcastic.

"I'm going home now," he finally says. Cally nods once, even though Cam has the feeling that they're not done discussing the matter. 

 

It's not until Cam is lying in bed that night, sleepless at one in the morning, that he realizes exactly why this hurts so  much. He's been trying to rationalize things to himself, talk himself out of feeling so shitty about it. They weren't even _together_ for two weeks, weren't even doing things but for...well, a month or so, but Chris was on his mind for another month before that and in his life far longer. 

Cam isn't just missing the man he's now reluctantly admitting to himself that he's probably in love with...he's missing someone who's been a presence in his life for much longer than he's been in his bed, a friend who's irreplaceable. It occurs to him that if this had happened to him with anyone else, if he'd broken up with anyone else, the first person he would have gone to would have been Chris. But he can't go talk to Chris about breaking up with Chris, can't get Chris to take him to a bar to drink Chris's memory into oblivion. 

He doesn’t really _have_ anyone he can talk to about the breakup. Except…

He lies on his side and stares at his phone on the nightstand fiercely. He can hardly see the outline of it in the dark, but he glares at it nonetheless, until he finally gives up and grabs at it.

It’s 1:21 eastern, he thinks, which means that if his mystery texter is indeed in the city his area code suggests, he’s an hour behind. For a minute, Cam’s more polite, rational inner voice tells him that you just don’t call people at midnight, but the louder, angrier voice inside him says _fuck that, this guy wrecked your relationship_ and with one finger, Cam touches the screen to call the number.

It rings three times before there’s an answer.

“Yeah,” says a voice on the other end. It sounds familiar. Not in a really personal way, Cam knows right away that it doesn’t belong to someone he’s close to…but like he’s heard the voice more than once before. For the life of him, though, he can’t place it. Maybe if he can just…get the guy to keep talking.

“How the hell did you even know about me and Chris in the first place?” Cam demands. It wasn’t what he was expecting to say, but as soon as it’s out, he realizes how much he’s been dying to know the answer.”

“Mutual friend.” the guy says shortly. Oh, so that’s what he’s going to do, keep his replies to one or two words, so Cam can’t figure him out. 

“Look,” he says, “I don’t know why you decided to start texting me. I just know that you made me think about a lot of stuff that I hadn’t even considered, and because of that I broke up with probably the only person in the world who has me figured out. And now I’m just sort of wondering… _what the hell am I supposed to do?”_

There’s a silence on the other end, and Cam can just barely hear the other guy breathing for a moment before he answers. 

“I ask myself that every day.” he says, quietly enough that Cam can’t catch any hint of anything individual about it. Nothing to distinguish the person form anybody else saying the same words. Except for a quiet, potent grief that is painfully obvious to Cam because it echoes the feeling he has in his own heart. 

“I don’t want this,” Cam shakes his head even though he’s fully aware that it’s a completely useless gesture over the phone. “I don’t want any of this. I didn’t ask to…I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t plan to get…”

“Obviously,” is the reply, and Cam stops. If everything this guy has texted him is true, he’s preaching to the choir here.

He hangs up the phone and throws it at the wall. He doesn’t hear whether it breaks or not, and he doesn’t get up to check, but he does grab at the pillow on Chris’s side of the bed and pull it over his head, burying his face in the fading smell of Kreider’s shampoo, because maybe if he can surround himself in it, maybe he can forget everything else, just for tonight.


	18. Wishing You Could Keep Me Closer

By Tuesday night, Chris is well aware that he's already pushing the envelope by having stayed on Cally's couch for the last three nights, and he's fully intending to go home and leave the captain alone without bothering him for once. Despite a goal and two assists, he’s feeling that disappointment that only a loss at home can bring, and it seems like a good night to be alone anyway. But as he's walking into his front hallway, his phone buzzes in his pocket insistently, signaling an incoming call, and when he pulls it out he sees Cally's name across the screen. He taps the screen to answer the call and lifts the phone to his ear.

"What's up?" he asks.

"Just making sure you got home alright."

Chris snorts.

"I'm fine. I'm not gonna drive my car off a bridge or anything over one loss."

"'Course not. The game's not the loss I'm worried about, though." 

"Or over a breakup. Jeez, Cal, I'm not a teenager crying my room over my great lost love, I can handle it."

"I talked to Cam," Cally says, and despite Chris's insistence that he is just _so_ not pining away or anything, he feels his breath catch in his throat.

"Oh?" he asks mildly, trying to keep his tone casual, not trusting himself to do so with any more than one syllable.

"Yeah. Chris, man, I don't think you're gonna like this, but I'm pretty sure he's telling you the truth. I don't think he's seeing anybody."

Chris doesn't know if that makes him feel better or worse. At least if Cam had run off with some woman he would have the comfort of knowing that she had some parts he didn't that Cam couldn't live without. 

"Then what's with his weird sneaky phone habits these days?" he asks.

"I didn't ask him about that. I gave him the same advice I'm gonna give you. Talk about it."

"I don't know if that's such a good idea. Last time we talked we both said some...well, some pretty shitty stuff to each other." Chris manages to shrug off his coat, switching his phone from one hand to the other as he does so.

"That's exactly why you need to talk about it. We can't afford to have you two shutting each other out. Even not considering the team factor, I don't want to see that happen to you two."

"I think it's already happened."

"Then you need to fix it."

"Why is that my job? He's the one who dumped me."

"I'm not saying it's your job all on your own, I'm saying you two need to talk about it. Get back to speaking terms and get your shit together."

"I have my shit together, thanks," Chris says grumpily. 

"On the ice, yeah."

"Isn't that all you have to care about?"

Cally sighs, and it sounds like the sigh of a parent who's explaining the same concept for the fiftieth time.

"I guess it's all I'm _obligated_ to care about, but I'd like to think that in addition to being your teammate, I'm also your friend. Both of you."

"How touching," Chris regrets his sarcasm even as he says it because it's not Cally he's mad at, not at all. 

"No need to be an asshole."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. Sorry. I'm really...I'm a little fucked up right now."

"Really?" Cally counters dryly. "No one could tell."

Chris is quiet, trying to think of what he ought to say next.

"Talk to him," Cally repeats. "Soon."

"I'm not-" Chris begins, but he hears the triple beep that signals the end of the call and he looks down at his phone, pulling it away from his face. "Son of a bitch," he mutters. 

 

Even though Chris is managing to keep himself held together on the ice, manages to put up points and look like he’s totally fine, the truth of the matter is that Cam’s absence is a really, really hard pill to swallow. Every time he can’t find something, he wonders if he left it at Cam’s place. 

 

Wednesday, he gets up in the morning and makes enough coffee for two people, and then, out of some strange sense of defiance, drinks all of it himself and tries to pretend like he just intentionally made that much for himself in the first place. At practice, no one asks about anything, and Chris can’t decide if he’s angry with Cally for telling everybody his business, or grateful to his captain for making sure nobody asks him questions he doesn’t want to answer.

 

On Thursday, they play St Louis and lose 2-1. Nash gets their only goal. Chris is relieved for the two-day break, but there’s so much publicity surrounding the upcoming stadium games that he’s almost more exhausted putting up a smile and pretending that everything’s just great than he is actually playing hockey.

 

It's not until Friday, on the other side of the loss to the Blues and an exhausting practice, that Chris comes out of the shower and finds himself finally, inevitably, alone in the locker room with Cam. He considers grabbing his stuff and rushing out the door, which he probably should have planned to do anyway but the shower had been strangely cathartic and he stayed in there way too long...and now it's just him and Cam in the room and it's too late to pretend they haven't noticed each other. 

Cam seems to be putting things in his own bag, probably to take it all to the stadium the next day. Chris goes about his own business without really acknowledging Cam anyway, even though he knows Cam's seen him...knows that Cam saw Chris wince when he came out of the showers and saw that he was the only person left in the room. Chris pulls on his pants wordlessly, and works his towel through his hair, trying to get it dry enough that it won’t freeze solid when he leaves the building.

"I guess this is the part where we have to talk to each other," Cam finally says, breaking the silence. Chris pulls his shirt over his head and shrugs. He has his back to Cam, and isn't even sure he can see the gesture. 

"Got nothing to say," he says shortly. Cam is quiet again for a few seconds, then Chris can hear him step closer until Cam’s _right there_ beside him, standing next to him like he’s not taking up all the oxygen in the room or at least all the oxygen in Chris’s lungs just by existing.

Chris hasn't realized up until that moment how accustomed he's gotten to holding himself a certain way around Cam, how much his body language has changed, how comfortable he is around the older man...not until just then, when he has to _not_ lean a little closer, has to keep himself contained within his own body without any touches or meaningful glances.

"I don't want to talk about things either," Cam says, like that's supposed to make it better that they both feel like they _have_ to. For once, he’s not wearing a hat, and his hair looks stupid, Chris tries to think viciously, but…it really doesn’t, it just looks soft and not stupid at all.

He crosses his arms over his chest because his hands feel like they want to go everywhere, do strange things, touch, feel, flap randomly in the air.

"Yeah," he agrees, but here they are.

Another moment of silence passes, and Chris struggles with the questions he wants to ask, the demands he wants to make, as well as the rising urge to shove Cam away and tell him in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t get to just invade Chris’s space like this after everything. 

"What's her name?" There are a lot of questions Chris could have asked, but he somehow picks that one, and it's stupid and childish and Cally already told him that he doesn't think Cam's actually seeing anyone, but he can't get the idea out of his head. 

"Who?"

"The girl you've been with."

Cam sighs lengthily.

"I'm not with any girls, Chris."

Kreider rubs at the back of his neck with one hand, trying to work out some of the aching tension that's gathered there over the past few days.

"Then who is it?" he demands, past the point of worrying about looking nosey or intrusive.

"Who's who?"

"The person you keep texting, dumbass. We were _fine_ and then you started getting all clingy with your phone and then suddenly we weren't fine and I'm smart enough to put two and two together."

Cam watches him for a moment before the beginnings of understanding start to creep into his eyes.

"That's why you think I’m seeing…Oh, _no_ , Chris, I'm not...I'm not cheating on you."

"Clearly not, since we're not even together."

"I _wasn't_. Even when we were."

"Then who and...why..."

"Honestly?" Cam asks, like he's not sure Chris will like the answer.

“No, I want you to lie to me some more. Yes, obviously.”

Cam hesitates, and Chris wonders if he's making up some bullshit answer.

"I don't know." Cam releases his breath in a long _whoosh_. 

Chris fixes a stony glare on him.

"Right. You just started texting a random number and based on that decided to screw me over."

"No. Some random number texted _me_ , and said some stuff that I really wasn't ready to hear, stuff I hadn't thought of and I'm pretty sure you hadn't either."

"What kind of- No, you know what? I don't care. I don't give a flying fuck what some random person says, I don't care if it's fucking Vladimir Putin being a dick about-"

A surprised laugh bursts out of Cam's chest like he's coughed it out, and Chris loses his train of thought.

"I don't think Vladimir Putin has a Chicago area code," Cam says, smiling, and Chris feels his heart shatter inside of his chest because _god_ he loves Cam's smile, the way the corners of his eyes turn up and they shine, framed by impossible eyelashes, and suddenly he's got a lump in his throat the size of Manhattan and he reaches out and grabs the front of Cam's shirt, backing him into the wall probably a little too hard. 

"Tell me you don't miss this," he says, his voice rough and heavy, resting the crown of his head against Cam's. "Stand there and look me in the eyes and tell me you don't want this, want me, want _us_."

Cam's hands come up and his fingers are at Chris's sides, just a feather-light phantom touch that Chris can hardly feel through the cloth of his t-shirt, and a sound comes from the back of his throat, a little moan that almost sounds like a whine. It definitely isn't close to any of the things Chris just asked him to say.

"I never said that," he tells Chris quietly, and they're close enough that Chris can feel the warmth of Cam's breath on his lips. They stand there silently for what feels like an eternity, Chris's hands rising and falling with Cam's chest as he breathes.

"Then come home with me." He tries to sound like he's not begging. "Stop this shit, and come home with me, and we'll figure this shit out together because I don't wanna do this without you."

"Do what?"

Chris struggles with the answer to that for a minute, and doesn't come up with one.

"Just come home," he repeats, quieter this time. 

For a split second, he sees indecision in Cam's eyes and he takes that second to lean in and crush his mouth against Cam's and it feels like heaven because Cam moans into it like Chris has been working him up for hours, he opens his mouth and Chris presses inside, tasting him, breathing him, terrified to end it because what if this is it, what if this is the last time he gets to do this, ever? And Cam's hands are in his hair, catching in the tangles of it, and Chris still has Cam's shirt balled in his fists, holding him tight against his own body. But finally, he has to pull back because he's losing his breath and can't take it in through his nose fast enough to keep up with how quickly Cam takes it away. 

"There's no way I can live with what it would do to you if we stayed together," Cam whispers on the edge of a ragged exhale.

Chris shakes his head helplessly.

"What about what it's doing to me if we don't?"

Cam smiles sadly, a smile that pulls up at his mouth but doesn't hold any of the light that a smile is supposed to, doesn't even make it to his eyes. It’s entirely different from the one of surprised amusement that he gave Chris a minute earlier, and Chris almost wants to make another stupid joke just to get _that_ smile back instead of this weird, depressing version of it.

"The heart's a remarkable thing, Chris. Resilient and all that."

"What's the phone number?"

Cam turns away, pushing past Chris to grab his bag from his stall.

"No," is all he says.

"Cam, come on, if you're going to walk out on me like this, the least you can do is-"

"I'm not giving you the phone number so you can call this guy and give him shit for telling me the truth."

Chris doesn't say anything to counter that because, well, that was exactly what he was planning to do and Cam knows it. 

"Yeah? Well, tell him something for me, then, next time you text him about how much better it is this way. Tell him to go fuck himself."

"That's mature," Cam breathes, and Chris wants to slap him in the face because how _dare_ he judge Chris for being _immature_ about this when he's the one who dumped him unceremoniously and without warning.

He wants to tell Cam that he can go fuck himself too, but somehow, he can't do it with the taste of Cam still on his lips.

"You know what," Chris says, and Cam pauses in the door on his way out, "if you ever get your shit together and stop being terrified of living, you come and find me. But I'm not gonna wait around forever."

"I hope not," Cam says just loud enough for Chris to hear it as he walks out of the room.

Chris stands there after he’s gone, and it takes a good thirty seconds before he feels pain in his palms and realizes how far he’s dug his nails into his own skin, not hard enough to break it, but hard enough that both palms are marked with angry red crescents that still sting a little. 

He sits down on the bench beside him and grips it tightly with both hands, staring down at the floor, at the same piece of the ground, for what feels like an eternity, until the fire goes out of him and the tightness in his throat finally subsides.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ermagerrrd, two updates in two days, is the world ending?  
> Actually, I wrote this one before the last one, and the scene has been floating around in my head since before I wrote them breaking up, so when I got it down I just couldn't wait to post it. :3 My poor boys. :(
> 
> This chapter title is also from Collect Call by Metric - it's a quality tune if you haven't heard it, so I definitely encourage you to check it out. :)
> 
> Also, uh, shameless plug here, but if you like fanfic and roleplaying and hockey players, you should come on over and play with us [here](http://hoteldelaglace.weebly.com). :D


	19. I Tried Carrying the Weight of the World

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL it only took me a month to update this, but IT'S ALMOST DONE, folks. Look, look, there's even a final updated chapter count. :O

The stadium games are a welcome distraction from the tension between the two of them. The absence of Chris in Cam’s life outside of hockey is something perplexing and senseless to him. It’s not like he didn’t _do_ things before he and Chris got together. Not like he had no life at all, and then Chris came along and breathed meaning into his existence. So why is it so hard for him to pull together the motivation to drag his ass off the couch on his days off? Why doesn’t he want to _do_ anything else? 

To both his and Kreider’s credit, they manage to pull of the media circus of the stadium games without giving up anything obvious. Kreider seems just _fine_ , goofing off during interviews, bowling Cam over during practice, and Cam…well, Cam tries to keep his focus centered on not saying anything much about Chris at all. It’s hard, but once he focuses on it he doesn’t lose that focus because they put a camera on his head and from there he’s on guard for every single moment of it. 

Then the extra cameras leave, and they’re back to normal games, most of which Cam doesn’t have to play. He starts once, against Edmonton. They lose 2-1 and honestly, as far as Cam is concerned, the Olympic break can’t come quick enough. 

He’s finishing up in the locker room after the game, going through his usual post-defeat routine of not talking to anyone and grunting in response to anything anyone tries to say to him, when he feels eyes on him. He looks up, suspecting that it’s either Cally trying to send him guilt-inducing glances, or Chris, sending him guilt-inducing glances accidentally, but he’s surprised to find that it’s neither. It’s Dominic Moore, who doesn’t actually say anything until after everyone else has pretty much cleared out but by that point, it’s pretty obvious from the way Dom is just sort of hanging around that Cam’s in for some kind of discussion, and he doesn’t bother trying to avoid it. Honestly, he’s a little curious - he and Dom aren’t especially close, but if Moore has something to say about the game or the way Cam played it, he definitely wants to hear it.

“Yeah?” Cam says finally.

Dom watches him for a minute, looking like he wants to say something, tossing a roll of tape back and forth in his hands. Cam waits, but Dom doesn't speak, and Cam lets out a huff of breath impatiently. 

"What?" he demands. "What is it?"

Dom presses his lips together, considering his words.

"It's just..." he begins, then pauses and Cam waves a hand to urge him on. "I think you should think about it."

"Think about what?"

"About you and Chris."

Cam frowns.

"You think I haven't thought about it? You think that's not...I mean, hockey, but other than that, it's basically the _only_ thing I think about."

"Do you think you're in love with him?"

Cam feels his breath catch in his throat, and he doesn't say anything, doesn't move for a minute or two.

"It doesn't matter," he says finally, quietly. 

"Of course it matters."

"No. I'm not letting him distract himself, throw away the best years of his career on me."

"Don't you think that should be his decision too?"

"Nobody knows how to make good decisions when they're twenty-two."

"Or when they're twenty-six, apparently," Dom adds, looking at him pointedly.

"Look, Dom, I know you're trying to help, but this is between me and Chris and at this point, I'm making a decision that has to be made because Chris won't do it."

"Are you in love with him?" Dom repeats, and Cam closes his eyes.

"Yes," he says, in what feels like the smallest voice that's ever come out of him.

"Then let me just say this, and I'll leave you alone. I don't know the first thing about what it feels like to be in love with another guy or how hard it is, or the shit you guys would be up against. But what I do know is that if you find the person you're meant to be with, if you find the person you love, you do not let them go, not ever. You take every minute and you live it and you breathe it and you hold onto it because someday it might not be there to hold onto."

And that's when it hits Cam like a stack of bricks, that Dom is invested in him and Chris because he _knows_ what it's like to lose the person you love most in the world, and Cam suddenly feels like a total asshole because he goes from being irritated to being absolutely chilled through with the conviction of Moore's words.

"I..." he begins, but Dom's already gotten up and is leaving, stepping away to his own stall to drop the roll of tape into it. Then Cam's alone.

He thinks about the things Dom said for a while. The things Dom has been through in his own life, those aren’t really something he has to worry about with Chris, that he’ll just really and truly disappear off the face of the earth one day. They play a sport that’s not exactly _safe,_ but it isn’t as if people are dying all over the place, either. 

He’s just thinking that when he sees Cally step into the room out of the corner of his eye, and that’s when he really starts to see the whole picture. Sometimes, there are things you imagine are constants, until suddenly, they aren’t. Cally’s still Cally, but with all the talk of the trade freeze the next day, there are also rumors that Cam honestly hadn’t had the time to entertain up until now.

That’s when it occurs to him that there’s really nothing certain about him being able to keep his eye on Chris. He can’t look after Chris, can’t protect him from his own reputation, from the rest of the NHL, because it’s entirely possible that management could make a decision one day and Chris could wind up in L.A. or Vancouver or somewhere else on the other side of the country, and…

“Fuck,” he mutters. Cally looks over at him.

“Hm?” 

“Nothing. I just…I’m a fucking idiot. Where’s Chris?”

“He already left, I think. Why?”

Cam shakes his head, grabbing at the few things he needs, and rushes out of the building, pulling up Chris’s number on his phone and calling it before he’s even outside.

It rings three times before Chris answers. When he does, he sounds cautious - rightly so, Cam’s willing to admit, because they haven’t really talked since the whole incident in the locker room two weeks earlier.

“Hi?” Chris says, questioningly, and Cam lifts up a hand to hail a cab desperately, scrambling into the back of it.

“I’m coming over,” he says, covering the phone with his hand as he gives the driver Chris’s address.

“I’m not even home yet,” Chris protests. “And…why?”

“You’ll get there before I do,” Cam presses.

“Cam, _why_?” Chris insists, and Cam shakes his head uselessly.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Haven’t we already done enough talking?”

“I don’t think so.”

There’s a silence on the other end as the cab pulls away from the curb, and Cam waits, holding his breath, feeling like if he breathes too loud, Chris might hang up on him. 

“Whatever,” Chris says, and hangs up. 

Cam looks down at the phone, and tries to figure out whether that was Chris agreeing to him coming over or just…Chris not wanting to talk to him. He decides that it was probably both. 

He doesn’t even know what he’s going to say to Chris when he gets there, and all his attempts to put together something of a conversation starter seem just…awful. He knows he needs to apologize (like, a lot). He’ll probably need to beg a little. But the most daunting task of all is that somehow, he has to get Chris’s trust back, and he’s honestly not sure if that’s something that’s salvageable at this point. Chris already asked him to come back, and Cam shut him down. It’s been two weeks since then, and Chris has been playing alright, it seems safe to assume that he’s started the moving on process already.

But in that moment, Cam can’t imagine going through the rest of his life with the knowledge that he didn’t even try. 

The cab pulls up outside of Chris’s building, and for a minute, Cam sits there, staring up at the building, somehow simultaneously wanting to climb up the emergency stairs as fast as he can and also wanting to tell the cab driver to turn around quick and take him home before Chris sees him. 

He pays his cab fare and gets out, nerves prickling up and down his spine the same way they do before a game. Except…when he’s about to play a game, he knows what he’s getting himself into. Knows what he has to do to get the job finished. And right now, he doesn’t have the first clue where he’s going to start. One foot in front of the other, Cam, he tells himself, walking towards the building. Someone is coming out, so he doesn’t have to call Chris to buzz him in, and he heads straight for the elevator, pressing the button. It slides open immediately, sparing him the moment or two of standing there waiting for it, but he still waits until the door starts to shut before getting up the nerve to step inside it. 

He toys with his phone, wondering if he should text Chris, tell him he’s on his way up, and decides against it, shoving his phone into his pocket instead. He still hasn’t come up with anything to say, hasn’t put together any kind of conversation starter by the time the elevator stops on Chris’s floor, and he tries to walk slowly down the hall in the off chance that something will come to him by the time he gets there, but it just doesn’t. 

He stops halfway down the hall, rests his hand against the wall, and wills himself to finish the distance to the door. He knocks, and Chris opens the door so quickly that Cam wonders if he was watching through the peephole the entire time. They watch each other for a moment.

“Can I…” Cam gestures towards the door, and Chris holds it open wordlessly.

“What can I do for you, Cam?” he asks, crossing his arms over his chest. Cam chews on his lower lip, and curses himself for not having the words.

“I’m sorry,” he says, because it seems as good a place to start as any. Chris’s eyes narrow and he tightens up a little, his shoulders drawing in on themselves.

“It’s a little late for that,” he says, which is exactly what Cam was afraid of. 

“No,” he says, more than a small amount of pleading in his voice. “Please, hear me out here.”

“I’m listening, I guess,” Chris allows.

“I’m sorry for…for making decisions for you that we should have made together. That was…stupid, and not fair, and really…”

“A dick move.” Chris provides easily, and Cam nods in agreement.

“Yeah. Absolutely. And I’m sorry for…doing it the way I did. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t.”

Chris looks him over, then turns away, walking towards his kitchen.

“Probably should have thought about that before you dumped me,” he says. Cam feels a surge of desperation rising up in his throat, blood rushing into his face, because he’s losing this argument…discussion, whatever it is, it’s not going the way he needs it to. There has never been anything more important, Cam thinks, not in his whole life, than making Chris understand this. Nothing, no game, no save, nothing. And Chris isn't budging.

"How do I know you're not just gonna change your mind again?” he demands, opening his refrigerator and pulling out a half-empty bottle of gatorade.

“I’m still…I still don’t want this to be the thing that defines your career.” Cam goes on, “I just…I also don’t want to…what if we end up playing for different teams, eventually? And I don’t get to see you at all anymore?”

“I’m not following.”

“I want you in my life,” Cam says plainly. “And if after everything, all you can give me is ‘friends,’ I’ll settle for that, I understand that, I can live with it, but…”

Chris puts the gatorade down and comes to stand in front of him, his eyes meeting Cam’s.

“What exactly are you saying here, Cam?”

Cam takes a deep breath, and he could swear that he can feel every single blood cell in his body. 

“I’m saying…I’m saying I’m in love with you, and I want to be with you, and I’m sorry it took me as long as it has to figure it out.”


	20. But I Know Where to Start

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is...really close to being over with, and it feels like I've been writing it for six years instead of six months :P This chapter actually got beta'd (unlike the rest of them, which I've kind of gone back and checked myself and fixed things in embarrassment weeks later) by the fabulous [hlundqvists](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hlundqvists/). Title for this chapter comes from Wake Me Up because I like happy endings and we're almost there.

It’s very odd for Chris, watching Cam stand there and say the things Chris has been wishing he would say for the past two weeks, especially after he’s all but given up on ever hearing them spoken out loud. There’s a part of him, a really demanding, insistent part, that says _this is the man you love, just kiss him, Chris, everyone makes mistakes, just kiss him and take him to bed._

But there’s another part of him that’s been undeniably, deeply hurt, and he can’t just ignore it. He has too many questions, there’s still too much fear and his pride has been hurt, too. The one question that really burns, the one that he knows he’s not going to be able to stop asking, is _why_.

“I want to know what he said that made you feel like you had to do this.” he tells Cam quietly.

Cam frowns, but Chris can tell by the little hesitation that he knows exactly what Chris is talking about.

“It wasn’t anything bad about you, Chris, it was just a lot of things that I hadn’t thought about that…”

“Can I read it, then?”

“The texts?”

Chris nods.

Cam hesitates, but hands over his phone.

“There’s…a lot of it,” he warns, but Chris doesn’t care, he slides his thumb across the screen and he starts to read.

 

[1.9.2014 3:24 AM] _Decide right now if he’s worth it._

[1.9.2014 6:14 AM] _Worth what?_

[1.9.2014 10:40 AM] _Everything._

[1.9.2014 10:40 AM] _Who is this?_

[1.9.2014 10:41 AM] _Somebody who knows this shit way too well._

[1.9.2014 10:41 AM] _Trying to scare me off?_

[1.9.2014 10:41 AM] _No. But think about what you're getting into._

[1.18.2014 1:21 AM] _I think I like what I’ve gotten myself into._

[1.18.2014 1:30 AM] _I hope you do._

[1.18.2014 1:31 AM] _What difference does it make to you?_

[1.18.2014 1:31 AM] _I just know what it’s like._

[1.18.2014 1:31 AM] _Why, are you dating a teammate?_

[1.18.2014 1:34 AM] _Not anymore._

[1.18.2014 1:35 AM] _What happened?_

[1.18.2014 1:37 AM] _Things get complicated. When you want something bad enough, you don’t think about the consequences._

[1.18.2014 1:37 AM] _Did someone find out?_

[1.18.2014 1:38 AM] _No. We broke up because we were getting careless and somebody WOULD have found out._

[1.18.2014 1:39 AM] _I don’t think I’d care if anyone found out. The team knows. They’re cool with it._

[1.18.2014 1:40 AM] _You say that. Have you thought about what would happen if other people found out?_

[1.18.2014 1:40 AM] _Some guys would be assholes. There might be picketing. Nothing we couldn’t handle._

[1.18.2014 1:41 AM] _Would you stake your career on that?_

[1.18.2014 1:41 AM] _On Chris? Absolutely._

 

Chris looks up from the phone, and glances at Cam. He almost wants to stop reading right there, just take that last text and save it and print it, hang it on his wall. But there’s more in the conversation, and he looks back down at it. 

Cam shifts near him, his hands in his pockets, waiting, and Chris can practically feel the anxious energy vibrating off of him.

 

[1.18.2014 1:43 AM] _Would you stake HIS career on it? Would he?_

[1.18.2014 1:44 AM] _It’s not going to end anybody’s career if people find out._

[1.18.2014 1:48 AM] _Maybe not. But it’s going to be all anybody will ever see. You win a cup, it’ll be ‘the New York Rangers, who made headlines when blah blah blah Cam Talbot and Chris Kreider blah blah blah’_

[1.18.2014 1:49 AM] _What, they’ll think they won the cup with our gay superpowers?_

[1.18.2014 1:49 AM] _hahaha_

[1.18.2014 1:55 AM] _No but it’ll be all they can see. They’re not going to see how hard you guys worked, they’re not going to talk about that, they’re going to talk about you and Chris and what impact it had, etc. etc. You should be ready for that. You should make sure HE’S ready for that._

 

There’s a difference in the time stamps then, but even if there weren’t, the nature of the next few texts would have been enough to tell Chris that the next part of the conversation came a couple days later.

 

[1.20.2014 8:45 AM] _Called it quits._

[1.20.2014 9:28 AM] _Shit. Why?_

[1.20.2014 9:29 AM] _What do you mean why, aren’t you the one who’s been telling me to do this all along?_

[1.20.2014 9:30 AM] _Fuck, no, man, I was trying to warn you, not scare you off._

 

There’s no more after that, and Chris looks up at Cam questioningly. Cam has his lips pressed together tightly as Chris hands him back the phone. 

“I called him the next day. After we lost to the Isles.” 

“So who is he?”

Cam shakes his head.

“I still don’t know. I don’t know if he wants me to know.”

“Well, fuck him.” Chris says indignantly. “What did he say?”

“Not much, and I hung up on him after a minute. I just…I get the feeling that he’s still kind of…not okay with the way his own relationship went down, and…”

“So he decided to wreck ours?”

“I mean, looking back, I don’t even think that’s what he was trying to do. I really think he was trying to reach out and…I don’t know, share some of his personal experience with me or whatever.”

Chris goes quiet for few seconds, turning all that over in his mind, trying to look at everything from some distant, outside perspective that he honestly knows isn’t possible. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Cam says, shaking his head. “Whatever he said, I shouldn’t have let that…I should have talked to you about it, instead of deciding myself for the both of us. I was…being really self-righteous and just didn’t-“

He goes quiet then because Chris stops fighting and shoves him up against the kitchen counter, his hands on Cam’s hips as he leans in to kiss him, tasting the last of whatever Cam was going to say as a vibration against his lips that quickly turns into a surprised little moan.

“Don’t ever fucking do it again,” he says, pulling away. He’s resting his forehead against Cam’s, so he feels it when Cam nods twice, then shakes his head, like he’s not sure whether to say _yes, you got it,_ or _no, I won’t_. Chris goes in for another kiss, and Cam opens up into it, parts his lips, opens his arms, wraps them around Chris, winding him up in a tight hold that has Chris pressed up against Cam’s chest close enough that he can’t breathe.

"I love you," Cam says. Chris can feel the hot rush of the words on Cam's breath against his own lips, and he can't do anything to stop the desperate little sound that comes from the back of his throat. Then suddenly, he's laughing and he doesn't know where _that's_ coming from but it bubbles out of him and he's resting his face against Cam's, shaking in his arms with laughter that's totally, embarrassingly inappropriate. Cam holds him at arm's length, and his eyebrows are up, questioning as he looks at him.

"I don't think you're supposed to laugh when somebody says that," he says, but there's amusement in his eyes and then he's laughing too and then Chris is leaning in for another kiss, short and punctuated by little bursts of laughter from both of them. And nothing's funny, there's nothing particularly amusing about the entire situation, but there's a feeling of such completely relief that washes over Chris once he's got Cam's arms around him again that it has to come out somehow...and laughing seems a much better solution than crying. He puts his hands to the sides of Cam's face, takes a good look at him, then kisses him, over and over, feeling a little better each time he does, and then, without really saying anything, he takes Cam's hand and starts for the bedroom. 

Cam goes along easily, and Chris backs him up against the bed, sliding his hands down over Cam's chest, working his fingers up under the hem of his shirt, pulling it up. They both seem a little reluctant to break apart long enough to get the shirt off over Cam's head, but he lifts his arms to help, and Chris throws the shirt somewhere on the floor. He fumbles with the button and zipper of Cam's pants slightly, and that's when he realizes that his hands are shaking. He's not even sure why - probably because he's gone weeks without touching Cam and he can't decide where to start, maybe because he's nervous that he's forgotten where and how Cam likes to be touched. 

Cam's skin is warm under his hands as he slides them down, pushing Cam's pants and boxers down his legs simultaneously and letting them fall to his ankles. He pauses, halfway through standing back up, and presses a kiss to the center of Cam's chest, hot and open-mouthed, tasting his skin. It's as if he's flipped a switch, because Cam moans quietly and slides a hand into Chris's hair, leaning into him, his other hand grabbing desperately at the button of Chris’s jeans, unfastening it after a few tries. He doesn't even wait to get the pants off, just shoves his hand inside of them, getting his fingers around Chris through his boxers, stroking him until he’s completely hard. That, honestly, doesn’t take very long; between the intensity of the argument, turned to hope and then actual, real reconciliation, Chris is practically humming with unspent emotion and desire. He rocks forward into Cam’s hand, desperate for more contact. 

There’s not a chance in hell that Chris is going to last long enough, or be able to wait long enough, for Cam to get inside him or vice-versa, but all he can think is how much he just wants to get his hands all over absolutely every inch of Cam’s skin. Spurred on by that thought, he puts his hands to Cam’s shoulders and pushes him backward onto the bed, taking just long enough to step out of his pants before climbing on after him. He straddles him, one knee on either side of Cam’s hips, then sits up to pull off his shirt, tossing it in the same general direction he threw Cam’s a minute earlier. 

Cam’s looking up at him, tongue caught between his lips as he licks them slowly, like it’s a subconscious reaction to watching Chris on top of him, and his eyes are wide, pupils dilated, fixed on Chris like he’s the center of the universe. A little moan comes out in the wake of the next breath Chris takes, and he leans forward, letting his hands come to rest on the bed at the sides of Cam’s head, and he leans down, trying his hardest to keep it together, to keep this from being over before it’s really even gotten started. He puts his head down, presses his lips to the soft skin of Cam’s neck, licking at the hollow below his ear and moving down, relishing the noises Cam starts to make. He can feel the sounds vibrating in Cam’s throat as he moves his mouth down over his neck, then up the line of his jaw, finally covering Cam’s mouth with his own in a slow kiss that leaves him totally breathless by the time he pulls away. 

"I love you," he says, finally, realizing that with the laughing and the desperate rush to get each other's clothes off, the only time he's actually told Cam that was when they broke up. When he remembers that, he has to say it again, just to wash the taste of that memory out of his mouth. "I love you," he murmurs again, and Cam moans, his hips arching up against Chris's body. 

"C'mon," he says, and that's all the encouragement Chris needs. "I just want..." 

"What, what?" Chris is more turned on than he can really ever remember being, but if Cam wants something, if he needs something, Chris wants to give it to him. 

"Just want your hands on me," Cam says, pleadingly. Chris obliges, reaching down and grabbing Cam's erection where it's pressing up towards his own, then thinks twice and reaches for the side of the bed, digging in the drawer of the nightstand. The lube is still there where he left it, and he pops the cap on the bottle easily with one hand, pouring probably a little too much onto his other hand before setting the bottle aside. 

He scoots down, wedges one knee in between Cam's thighs, then the other once Cam spreads his legs far enough for Chris to kneel between them, slicking his hands up with the lube. He works his hand over Cam's length a few times, slowly, until Cam is working his hips into each movement.

"Fuck..." Cam breathes, and Chris swallows hard, because he'd forgotten exactly how much he liked the way Cam sounds when he's turned on, forgotten about the little things, like Cam's hands, grasping at the sheets like he needs something to hold himself down...the way Cam's head tilts back and his eyes slide shut so Chris can see the fringe of his eyelashes against the skin of his face, pale in the dim lighting of the room. He almost forgets to breathe as he keeps his hand moving. "Fuck," Cam says again, then, almost too quietly for Chris to hear, "I missed you so much."

Chris can't help the groan he makes then, and he lets his head fall forward, rocking his hips, pressing himself into the groove between Cam's leg and his body, smoothing his hand over the skin first to leave a trail of slickness behind to slide up against. 

Chris lets one hand go lower, presses a finger against Cam's opening, and that's when Cam starts to come undone, grabbing at the sheets with one hand, his other reaching desperately for Chris, like he wants to touch anything he can reach. Chris doesn't get any closer, doesn't move further within reach, he's too focused as he slides the tip of his index finger inside. He's painfully hard, but all he can think of is that he just wants to show Cam exactly what he's been missing, remind him why the two of them together is such a fantastic idea.

"Please, please, please," Cam begs, as Chris works his hand a little faster, squeezing Cam a little tighter, sliding his finger in and out in time with the little thrusts Cam is making towards him. "It's not gonna take much."

"I got you," Chris says softly, transfixed by the way Cam seems to be totally lost to the world around him, his head thrown to one side against the bed, jaw slack and lips parted. Chris adds another finger, pushes the two deep inside of him, crooking them just _so_ , the way he knows will make Cam moan desperately for more - which it does, the moan he's waiting for is desperate and rough and sounds like it's being pulled out of Cam without him even meaning to make a sound. 

After that, it only takes a few more strokes of his hand on Cam's dick before Cam is swearing and coming over Chris's hand and his own abs, his entire body tensing, muscles taut, trembling. Chris watches him, a little lost in it, in how surreal it is to actually be here again, and he feels the tightness building in the core of him. He lets his hand go flat on Cam's stomach, sliding his fingers out of him to wrap the other hand around himself. Cam props himself up on his elbows, watching, reaching out with a hand, but Chris is so close that he just grabs Cam's wrist with his free hand, holding him tightly as he works himself over the edge. 

He comes hard, into the mess that Cam already left on his own stomach, letting himself fall forward, managing to catch his weight with one hand planted beside Cam's head, and feels Cam's hand in his hair, stroking through the tangles of it, fingertips raking lines against his scalp. 

"You're actually beautiful," Cam says quietly, and Chris is still coming down but he has the presence of mind that he could laugh if he wants to, tell Cam that he's being cheesy as fuck and that people don't really _say_ things like that. But he doesn't. He kisses Cam softly, a trio of gentle, lingering kisses, then goes down onto the bed beside him, grabbing one of the pillows and pulling it down. Cam lifts up his head and Chris wedges the one pillow underneath both of them. 

They're quiet for a few minutes, aside from the rush of breath that slows the longer they lie there. The roar of blood pounding in Chris's ears gradually goes down, and he rolls onto his side, facing Cam. Cam looks over at him, then reaches over and grabs the box of tissue Chris keeps beside the bed and goes about cleaning himself up while Chris traces slow circles over his shoulder with his fingertips. Then, finally, Cam rolls back to face him, close enough that they both still fit on the same pillow, and he reaches up to touch Chris's lips with one finger.

"Don't know what I thought I was doing without you," he admits quietly. Chris feels a little twinge of something in his heart, and he's honestly not sure whether it's fear or affection or both, it's just a little tightness in his chest that he can't readily explain.

"Then...keep me this time," he says, and Cam nods, kissing him a little awkwardly given the fact that neither of them can turn their heads really well.

"Yeah," he says, "I think I will."


	21. And Love Is the Prize

The entire way to Pittsburgh, Cam tries not to keep looking at Chris. And somehow, Chris is just as good at keeping his cool in the wake of fantastic makeup sex as he was at keeping his cool over breaking up. Cam admires that, but he also can't quite figure out how Chris does it. It isn't that he can't control himself, but that doesn't mean he isn't constantly thinking about the things they could be doing if they were at home, if he had Chris alone.

It's different for Chris, he knows, because Chris actually has to play. Cam isn't starting in Pittsburgh and he knows it, so he can afford to let his mind wander a little, but Chris is already in game mode before they get through morning skate. Not for the first time, Cam lets himself get a little lost in admiring Chris's work ethic - for somebody as young as he is, he sure seems to have his shit together, at least as far as hockey is concerned. 

The game goes to a shootout, but they manage to pull it off. 

Cam's phone has three notifications on it when he pulls it out of his bag after the game. Two are from his mom, and one is from Mr Chicago, which is weird, because they haven't actually spoken since Cam hung up on him that night. 

_Gonna be out of town for a couple weeks. See you when I get back._ the text message says. Kreider is leaning over him before Cam really finishes reading the text.

"What's up? You look...perplexed." 

"Nothing, it's just...haven't heard from this guy in couple days and now he sends me this." He shows Chris the phone.

"So," Chris says, "somebody's going to Sochi."

That makes perfect sense, Cam would have come to the same conclusion himself in a few seconds, if he'd thought about it. The part that he's still trying to wrap his mind around is the _See you when I get back_. 

"Why would he say that, though?" he asks Chris, pointing at the sentence. Chris hardly thinks for a second before he answers. 

"Because we play the Hawks after the break," he says, and there's a little bit of uncertainty in his voice, like he's guessing, but Cam thinks he's right. "Did he even say how the hell he found out about us?"

"Yeah," Cam nods, remembering. "Said we had a mutual friend."

"Blackhawks going to Sochi," Chris muses. "That narrows it down a little, doesn't it?"

Cam laughs. 

"Yeah, to what, a third of the team?"

"Something like that." Chris grins. "C'mon, let's get out of here, get this vacation started."

They spend the Olympic break making up for lost time. And yeah, they spend a lot of it in bed, some of it on the couch, most of it with their hands all over one another, but they do other stuff, too. They go out, see movies, they watch the games on TV. They have some of the other guys over to watch, too, every now and then, mostly over at Chris's place because his TV is bigger.

They also manage to go _out_ a lot - and Cam discovers that being with Chris out in public, doing things with him, dating him, is nearly as much fun as the sex. The two of them already know each other pretty well. They spent enough time in Hartford together that they already have the basics down. Cam already knew Chris's favorite foods, what kinds of music he loves and hates. He knew how Chris doesn't exactly _cry_ at the ends of sad movies but he sort of excuses himself and splashes his face with water in the bathroom of the theater...only now, when Chris does it, Cam follows him into the bathroom, makes sure no one else is in any of the stalls, then comes up behind him at the sink, slides his arms around Chris's waist and teases him about it, kissing the side of his neck so Chris knows he doesn't mean it.

He knew that Chris likes to listen to music in the car, but he learns that Chris also seems to be inspired to hold his hand by a lot of really strange stuff. Like when they're driving along and something comes on Chris's iPod that's in _German_ and Cam has no idea at all what it means but Chris looks over at him, gets a funny look on his face, and grabs Cam's hand, wrapping it up tightly in his own and resting them together on Cam's leg.

But there are things he didn't know, couldn't have known, and those are the things he really enjoys learning about Chris during the two weeks they have together without any games. He learns that Chris has to have all the bottles in the shower arranged - not by size or anything rational, but by _color._ He learns that the only thing Chris likes more than bacon in the morning is getting to sleep until two and _then_ eat the bacon. He learns the little sounds Chris makes when he's thinking, the ones he doesn't even think Chris realizes that he's making, he starts to understand which ones mean Chris is just thinking _really hard_ and which ones actually mean he'd like a little help figuring something out.

By the time the Olympics start to wrap up, he has also learned that Chris will _definitely_ make him sleep on the couch of his own apartment if he gloats too much after Canada beats the U.S., only to try to crawl onto the couch next to him at three a.m. (which results in both of them falling onto the floor and then migrating to the bedroom together). But after all of that, there's still _so much_ for him to learn, and he doesn't even think that there's enough time in one lifetime.

 

They also go to Massachusetts for a couple of days - Cam meets Chris’s family, who, to his surprise, already know about them. 

“Well, yeah,” says Chris, “I wasn’t going to pull the ‘I’m bringing my best friend home for the break, oh, by the way, now that you’ve met him, I should tell you that we’re deeply in love’ trick.”

Cam laughs at that.

“I didn’t know that was…a known strategy,” he says, and kisses Chris hard, standing there on the back porch of his parents’ house, hands laced together between them, before Chris’s sister comes out to tell them that dinner’s on the table. 

It's comfortable, it's right, and it's the most at home Cam can ever remember feeling.

 

The night before they come back from the break to play Chicago, they're sitting on the couch in Cam's living room. Cam has one arm around Chris, his feet propped up on the coffee table, and Chris has one of his legs draped over them, the other foot on the floor as he thumbs through the channels on TV. 

"You ready to go back?" he asks. Cam thinks about that for a few seconds, fingers drawing little circles on the fabric of the tshirt Chris is wearing.

"Guess so," he shrugs. "I mean, yeah, I have to be, don't I?" He laughs. Chris pokes him.

"C'mon, you get to start against the Hawks, that's gotta feel good, right?"

Cam ducks his head. 

"It's a lot of pressure," he admits. Chris watches him for a few seconds, a little awkwardly, given how close they are to each other, but then he leans in and kisses him and that's not awkward at all, that's just really nice, and Cam smiles.

"Bunch of 'em have been in Russia for two weeks," Chris points out, "I think you got it."

Cam pulls Chris into his lap and kisses him until their lips are sore, until neither of them has any breath left.

 

 

There are eleven seconds left in the game when the Blackhawks put their only goal past Cam, and he couldn't be more frustrated with himself. He keeps his focus, though, manages one more really strong save, and the Rangers take the game 2-1. There's a little disappointment at not getting the shutout, but more than anything, Cam is just relieved that they got the points. 

At the end, Chris skates over, leans in, and gives him his kiss on the crown of his mask. Cam's glad that the mask is covering most of his face, because he's grinning like an idiot and so is Chris, and this time, somewhere behind the stupid, beautiful grin that he _always_ has when they win, there's something in his eyes that makes Cam swallow hard, thinking of what that look in Chris's eyes means for later that night.

He tries to put those thoughts out of his mind as they all head off the ice, and manages to do so pretty effectively. It takes him a few minutes to come out of "super goalie mode" (as Chris refers to his game face). Once he emerges from the shower, he dresses quickly, then rubs a towel over his hair enthusiastically. 

"Hey," Chris says, "any word from Chicago?"

Cam shrugs, sits down, digs in his bag for his phone, and pulls it out.

"Nothing yet," he says, holding the phone up for Chris to see the screen.

"What are you guys talking about?" Hagelin asks, flipping his head down vigorously enough that a spray of water droplets cascade through the air towards them.

Chris glances at Cam, and Cam shrugs in a _go ahead_ gesture.

"Somebody in Chicago knows about..." Chris waves a finger between himself and Cam. 

"Is there any trouble?" Hank asks, He's in his suit, and looking even more impeccable than usual, which makes total sense, being that he didn't actually have to play. He also looks deeply concerned, and Cam feels a little wave of gratitude. Every time he thinks about how completely the entire team has embraced the idea of him and Chris being together, his chest tightens a little. 

"I don't think so." Cam shakes his head. "He's known for a while. He-"

Cam's phone buzzes, and he picks it up.

"He wants to meet up," he says, looking up at Chris. 

"So go see him," Chris shrugs. "He probably wants to apologize or something."

Cam doesn't know about that, but he _is_ curious, after all this time, who's been on the other end of the phone.

"I think you should come, too."

"Yeah?" Chris doesn't look sure. "You think he'll mind?"

"I don't actually care," Cam shrugs. "I'm not discussing our relationship with anybody without you. Not again."

"Well," Chris points out, "That's not really an option, unless you're gonna handcuff yourself to me for the rest of your life."

Hagelin laughs, then goes back to drying his hair, and Hank just smiles quietly.

"Yeah, but...I'd really like it if you'd come with me."

Chris's smile softens a little as he looks down at Cam, and he nods.

"'Kay," he agrees easily. "Just let me get dressed and all."

It takes them a little while to get out of the Garden, but in the meantime, Cam manages to arrange a meeting spot. They settle on a bar somewhere in Midtown, a place that shouldn't be too busy on a Thursday night, something that should let them go unnoticed, even after a home game. 

Chris hooks a finger through one of Cam's as they walk along on the sidewalk, and Cam hesitates briefly. They're in public...someone could see, but tonight, he doesn't care. 

"Do you think we'll want to tell people?" he asks, as they round a corner. Chris looks up at the night sky, and gives Cam's finger a little squeeze.

"Eventually, yeah," he says. "Or they'll just figure it out. It's not hard to see, if you're looking."

Cam, who has actually been looking at Chris with no small amount of affection on his face as he's been talking, has to agree with that.

"Yeah, that's true enough." 

"I don't mind if everyone knows," Chris says. "For the record. Since we never really did talk about all that."

Cam is quiet for a minute, then shakes his head. 

"I don't care for me. I never did take the traditional route getting here, don't know why I should change that up now. I really only ever thought about it because you...I mean, you're _really good_ , Chris. You have a whole hell of a lot of professional hockey ahead of you."

Chris grins.

"Like to think so, anyway. But it's...I'm not gonna say that I could be happy without that. I need hockey, you know that about me. I need the game, the competition, all of it. But if I have to give you up for it, the hockey is never going to be enough."

Cam grabs him there, on the street, just outside the door of the bar they're about to go into, and he kisses him sweetly, softly, until Chris makes that little moaning sound in the back of his throat that Cam knows means he'd better stop or be ready to take it somewhere else. He pulls back, smiles at Chris, who smiles back, his teeth flashing white in dark, reflecting the lights from the bar.

"Love you."

"Love you, too." Cam says quietly. "Let's go meet our secret admirer, hm?"

They duck into the door, take a look around. The bar is populated, not heavily, but there are enough people that there aren't really any free seats, with the exception of a couple tables with people sitting alone at them. Cam glances over those, skips over a table that's a group of girls, another that's a group of guys...then locks eyes with Jonathan Toews.

Chris obviously sees him at the same time Cam does, because his fingers tighten in the cloth of Cam's coat at the small of his back. Cam pulls him along, makes the short walk to close the distance, then slides into the booth across from Toews.

"What's up?" he asks, unable to really think of any other way to begin the conversation.

"Not much," Jonny responds, quickly, reflexively. 

"So..." Cam tries again.

"I just..." Jonny hesitates. "I wanted to see you two."

Cam glances at Chris, then back at Jonny.

"Well," he says, "here we are."  

"So what's your deal, anyway?" Chris blurts out, and Cam gives him a little glance. Jonny seems unfazed by that, though, and shakes his head.

"I don't really have one. I just...when I heard about you guys, I wanted to make sure you didn't make the same mistakes I did."

This is a little surreal for Cam, the way Jonny's talking about these things with obvious experience, considering the fact that Toews is a little younger than he is, at least.

"I'm gonna go get us drinks," Chris announces, standing up. Cam looks up at him questioningly, trying to figure out whether he's trying to duck out for some other reason, but there's nothing in Chris's expression that would indicate that, so he just nods as Chris heads off to the bar.

"You guys have a really good thing, don't you?" Jonny asks, and Cam doesn't even have to think about that, he just nods.

"Yeah. I think...look, I was pretty pissed with you for a while. Not that I knew it was you, but..."

"No, I totally get that," Jonny agrees. "I forget, sometimes, that not everybody's used to the way I...help."

Cam chuckles at that.

"Your methods _are_ a little strange," he admits, and Tazer grins. 

"It was just that...when Dan texted me, he was really just doing it for me, because he knew my story. I never really tried to hide it from the guys."

"Dan?" Cam's first thought is Girardi, and he can't quite figure out why G would be texting Toews, and then the pieces start to fall into place. Dan Carcillo, who used to play for the Blackhawks. Dan Carcillo, who joined the team just before that night in Chicago when everybody found out about Cam and Chris. It's all starting to come together, Cam thinks. 

"There it is." Tazer says, smiling a little at the obvious realization that must be written across Cam's face. "I wasn't even going to text you at first. And then I was going to text Chris, instead of you, but...I don't know, something told me to talk to you instead."

Cam wonders for a minute how differently things would have gone if Jonny _had_ called Chris instead. How Chris would have taken it, whether he would have done a better job of reading between the lines and realizing that Jonny wasn't trying to convince him to break up with Cam at all. 

"It all worked out, in the end," Cam says. "We're happy." 

Chris returns at that moment with the three beers, large hands wrapped around all three of them, and sets them down on the wooden surface of the table. Cam and Jonny reach for them simultaneously, and each take one as Chris slides back into the seat next to Cam.

"What about you?" Cam asks, as Jonny swallows his sip of beer.

"What about me?"

"You seemed...what's  your situation, with the guy you were..."

Jonny shakes his head.

"That's...the past. The...increasingly distant past," he amends, scraping at the label of his beer with one fingernail. 

"Didn't sound like it, when you mentioned it on the phone," Cam points out. He's not sure why he's being so nosy, except for the fact that Jonny at least _tried_ to help him and Cam out, and now he's sort of interested in why Jonny can't help himself to his own happily ever after.

"No, it's definitely the past," Jonny insists. "He's...that ship has sailed."

"How do you know?" Chris asks. Jonny gives him a dispassionate glance.

"He's having a kid, that's how I know." 

There's a moment of uncomfortable silence, then Chris says "Oh," and that's that. Tazer takes another gulp of beer, then shrugs.

"There are other...possibilities, I'm just...only just now getting around to convincing myself I'm ready for them," he says. Cam doesn't pry this time, doesn't ask whether "other possibilities" equals another interested teammate or whether Tazer just is that gun-shy when it comes to trusting anybody again. 

“You didn’t _want_ to end things, did you?” Chris says quietly, and Jonny looks over at him sharply, then shakes his head.

“No. I didn’t, but I had to. We kind of…did it together, mutually agreed on it. He made a lot of good points, how it wasn’t the right time in either of our lives to be thinking about anything serious, how we were putting our futures on the line. And he was willing to keep it up, just...casually...but…I couldn’t, I couldn’t half-ass it. I was in love with him. I couldn’t pretend it was just…friends fucking, or whatever.”

There’s another silence at the table, and they all three sip their beers, almost at the same time.

“Anyway,” Jonny says, “that’s the past, _my_ past, and that’s not what I wanted to drag you guys into. I want you guys to make it. That's really all I wanted to check on. Because if...if you guys can make it, and if I can help with that, if I can say anything that helps with that, maybe I can let go of...the other thing. I’m glad you’re good now."

Cam looks over at Chris, and Chris smiles back at him. 

"Yeah," Chris says, nodding and leaning over to bump his forehead against Cam's. "I think we're good."


	22. Epilogue

Ryan Callahan gets traded to the Tampa Bay Lightning on a Wednesday. It feels like a Wednesday just like any other, except for the fact that he's leaving the Garden and doesn't actually know when he'll be back. That part is strange. Every time he's left this place for most of the last decade, he's known he'll be back again. This time...he doesn't have any idea. 

He doesn't have to be out of town immediately, not like St. Louis, who's apparently going to be playing _that night_. The Lightning don't play until the following night, so there's really no reason to rush. He probably has time to text one of the guys, and he knows if he did, they'd probably all come out to see him off. But they don't even know he's been traded yet, and Cally doesn't really want to be the one to break the news to them. It's not his job, and he doesn't know if he has it in him to see the looks on their faces anyway. He hears voices, though, laughter, down one of the halls on his way out, and his curiosity gets the better of him. 

It's Cam and Chris, and Cally doesn't know what they're doing out here, but he can take a few guesses, given that the locker room was swarming with cameras when he left. He can sympathize with the feeling of wanting to get away from them for a few minutes. 

He rests a hand on the wall and watches them, and for a moment, it's clear that they don't even know he's there. Cam says something he can't hear, Chris laughs, infectiously, bringing a small smile to Ryan's own face. 

"You know," Cam says, elbowing Chris in the side. "There's still _hours_ til the deadline. I bet I could talk them into trading you if you're gonna be like that."

"Yeah?" Chris says, getting up in Cam's space, their faces inches apart. "That what you want? A long-distance relationship so you can try to get me naked on Skype?"

That's way too much information, and under any other circumstances, Cally would probably roll his eyes, walk away, and good-naturedly bemoan the children he has to put up with on his team. Except...it's not his team anymore, not as of a short while ago, and all he really feels is relief that they're happy.

He turns to go, and that's when they see him. Chris takes a quick step back from Cam instinctively, before he realizes who it is at the end of the hall, then he grins. 

"Hey Ca-" he begins, then he sees the things Cally's carrying, and his eyes go a little wide. Cam has a similar reaction; his lips part like he wants to ask the question but can't find the words. 

"Did-" he starts, and Cally just lifts a finger to his lips in a _shh_ gesture.

"Take care of each other," he says, pointing the same finger from Cam to Chris and back again. "Okay?"

Chris looks at Cam, and Cam looks right back at him, then they both nod. Cally gives them a smile, and walks away before he can do anything else stupid and parent-like. 

Chris and Cam are going to be fine, he thinks.

Everything is, in the end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...I guess that's it. It feels really weird to mark this as the last chapter, but I've told the story I wanted to tell, and...that's all there is to do, isn't there? Thank you so, so much for reading this and commenting on it and sticking around for the eternity it took me to finish it! And now that it's over, you can always find me on [tumblr](http://lundqvisition.tumblr.com) :)


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